Sudhanshu Handa
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3664774 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Sudhanshu Handa |
| PRENOMES | Sudhanshu |
| SOBRENOME | Handa |
| ASSINATURA | HANDA S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 32 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 79 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 30 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1996 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Cash transfers relax climate-induced mobility constraints in Kenya
The use of migration as an adaptation strategy is now recognized by scholars and policymakers as a key response to climate change. Cash transfer programs, now being implemented worldwide, also have the potential to facilitate adaptation and promote resilience in low- and middle-income countries. We investigate the extent to which a cash transfer program in Kenya promoted the mobility of household members due to climate shocks, leveraging exogenou…
The timing of the unconditional cash transfers and human capital accumulation
Unconditional Cash Transfers (UCTs) are effective policy instruments to increase schooling outcomes, but are UCTs effective in the long term? This paper provides the first evidence on the long-term schooling impacts of a national cash transfer program in Africa. Specifically, we follow a panel of school-aged children in the Malawi Social Cash Transfer Program (SCTP) in three waves (2013-baseline, 2015-endline, and 2021-follow-up) and compare thei…
Do cash transfer programs have different effects on children based on household disability status? Evidence from Malawi and Zambia
Globally, about 1 billion people have disabilities. Cash transfers (CTs) are social protection programs often explicitly including people with disabilities. There is little research differentiating CT impacts by disability status. We used a triple difference estimation strategy with three‐way interaction terms to estimate disability‐differential impacts of CTs in Malawi and Zambia on material needs, physical health, and nutritional status among c…
Building Resilience through Social Protection
We apply a well-known resilience index developed by the FAO to data from a cash transfer evaluation in Malawi to address two key questions: Is the FAO index a valid measure of resilience? Can an unconditional cash transfer significantly boost household resilience? Our answer to both these questions is affirmative. The resilience index positively predicts future positive coping behaviour among households (predictive validity) and is a stronger pre…
Migration and fuel use in rural Zambia
What is the effect of migration on fuel use in rural Zambia? Opportunities to increase income can be scarce in this setting; in response, households may pursue a migration strategy to increase resources as well as to mitigate risk. Migrant remittances may make it possible for households to shift from primary reliance on firewood to charcoal, and the loss of productive labor through migration may reinforce this shift. This paper uses four waves of…
The Impact of a Large-Scale Poverty-Targeted Cash Transfer Program on Intertemporal Choice
We use a social experiment to test whether the government of Zambia’s cash transfer program affects intertemporal choice. A cash transfer program may also alter expectations about future quality of life and make one happier, two conditions that can affect intertemporal decision-making and the desire to invest in the future. We find that the program affects time discounting and that psychological states are also strongly associated with time disco…
Cash Transfers Enable Households to Cope with Agricultural Production and Price Shocks
Climate change is projected to dramatically disrupt rainfall patterns and agricultural yields in Sub-Saharan Africa. These shocks to food production can mire farming households in poverty traps. This study investigates whether unconditional cash transfers can help households cope with agricultural production and price shocks. We find that cash empowers poor, rural households facing these negative shocks to employ coping strategies typically used …
Early Adoption of an Improved Household Energy System in Urban Rwanda
Government of Malawi's unconditional cash transfer improves youth mental health
We explore the impacts of Malawi's national unconditional cash transfer program targeting ultra-poor households on youth mental health. Experimental findings show that the program significantly improved mental health outcomes. Among girls in particular, the program reduces indications of depression by about 15 percentage points. We investigate the contribution of different possible pathways to the overall program impact, including education, heal…
One Plus One can be Greater than Two
This paper investigates the interplay between the Social Cash Transfer Programme (SCTP) and the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) in Malawi. We take advantage of data collected from a seventeen-month evaluation of a sample of households eligible to receive SCTP, which also provided information about inclusion into FISP. We estimate two types of synergies: i) the complementarity between SCTP and FISP, i.e. whether the impact of both intervention…
Household air pollution (HAP), microenvironment and child health
Exposure to household air pollution (HAP) from cooking and heating with solid fuels is major risk factor for morbidity and mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. Children under five are particularly at risk for acute lower respiratory infection. We use baseline data from randomized controlled trial evaluating a household energy intervention in Gisenyi, Rwanda to investigate the role of the microenvironment as a determinant of children's HAP-related hea…
The role of productive activities in the lives of adolescents
Adolescence is an important transitional period, separate from both childhood and adulthood. Critical physical and mental development occurs during adolescence, including emotional skills, physical, and mental abilities. Behaviors adopted during this lifecourse period have critical implications for adolescents' future health and well-being. The main research question of the present study is: what is the role of productive activities in the lives …
Cash Transfers, Early Marriage, and Fertility in Malawi and Zambia
There is increasing interest in the ability of cash transfers to facilitate safe transitions to adulthood in low‐income settings; however, evidence from scaled‐up government programming demonstrating this potential is scarce. Using two experimental evaluations of unconditional cash transfers targeted to ultra‐poor and labor‐constrained households over approximately three years in Malawi and Zambia, we examine whether cash transfers delayed early …
Impact of the Economic Crisis on Children in Rich Countries
This chapter provides an overview of how the Great Recession affected the economies of the industrialized world and fed through to social spending and to key indicators of child poverty and material deprivation. This sets the context for the in-depth case studies of eleven countries presented in the rest of this volume. The chapter describes macro-economic and labour market trends across forty-one rich countries, reviews changes in child poverty …
Children of Austerity
The 2008 financial crisis triggered the worst global recession since the Great Depression. Many OECD countries responded to the crisis by reducing social spending. Through eleven diverse country case studies (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States), this volume describes the evolution of child poverty and material well-being during the crisis, and links these outcomes with th…
Investments in children’s health and the Kenyan cash transfer for orphans and vulnerable children
Child mortality is one of the most pressing global health and policy issues in the developing world. The leading drivers of death-pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria-are preventable and treatable. However, these illnesses are exacerbated by a lack of accessible nutrition, water, basic and preventive health services, and sanitary living conditions-all factors which are more likely to disproportionately impact the poor. We examine whether Kenya's large…
Poverty and perceived stress
Effects of a Large-Scale Unconditional Cash Transfer Program on Mental Health Outcomes of Young People in Kenya
Social networks, social participation, and health among youth living in extreme poverty in rural Malawi
Is Graduation from Social Safety Nets Possible? Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa
In the last decade social cash transfer programmes have become extremely popular in sub-Saharan Africa, and often portrayed as an instrument that can facilitate graduation out of poverty. The evidence on whether social cash transfers have had actual effects on graduation, however, is limited. This paper provides a cross-country reflection of the potential effects of social cash transfers on graduation, drawing from impact evaluation results of ca…
Impact of the Kenya Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children on early pregnancy and marriage of adolescent girls
The Government of Kenya's Cash Transfer Program Reduces the Risk of Sexual Debut among Young People Age 15-25
The aim of this study is to assess whether the Government of Kenya's Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children (Kenya CT-OVC) can reduce the risk of HIV among young people by postponing sexual debut. The program provides an unconditional transfer of US$20 per month directly to the main caregiver in the household. An evaluation of the program was implemented in 2007-2009 in seven districts. Fourteen Locations were randomly assigned to rece…
Cash Transfer Programme, Productive Activities and Labour Supply
This paper reports analysis of the impact of Kenya's Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children Programme on the household decisions on productive activities using data from a randomized experimental design. Results show that the programme had a positive and significant impact on food consumption coming from home production, accumulation of productive assets, especially on the ownership of small livestock and on formation of nonfarm enterp…
Examination of facilitators and barriers to home‐based supplemental feeding with ready‐to‐use food for underweight children in western Uganda
Poor complementary feeding practices and low-quality complementary foods are significant causes of growth faltering and child mortality throughout the developing world. Ready-to-use foods (RUF) are energy-dense, lipid-based products that do not require cooking or refrigeration that have been used to prevent and treat malnutrition among vulnerable children. The effectiveness of these products in improving child nutritional status depends on househ…
Matching the Gold Standard
We compare nonexperimental impact estimates based on matching methods with those from a randomized evaluation to determine whether the nonexperimental approach can “match” the so‐called gold standard. The social experiment we use was carried out to evaluate a geographically targeted conditional cash transfer antipoverty program in Nicaragua. The outcomes we assess include several components of household expenditure and a variety of children’s hea…
Poverty and perceived stress
Impact of the Kenya Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children on early pregnancy and marriage of adolescent girls
Government of Malawi's unconditional cash transfer improves youth mental health
We explore the impacts of Malawi's national unconditional cash transfer program targeting ultra-poor households on youth mental health. Experimental findings show that the program significantly improved mental health outcomes. Among girls in particular, the program reduces indications of depression by about 15 percentage points. We investigate the contribution of different possible pathways to the overall program impact, including education, heal…
Social networks, social participation, and health among youth living in extreme poverty in rural Malawi
Maternal Education and Child Height
Cash Transfers, Early Marriage, and Fertility in Malawi and Zambia
There is increasing interest in the ability of cash transfers to facilitate safe transitions to adulthood in low‐income settings; however, evidence from scaled‐up government programming demonstrating this potential is scarce. Using two experimental evaluations of unconditional cash transfers targeted to ultra‐poor and labor‐constrained households over approximately three years in Malawi and Zambia, we examine whether cash transfers delayed early …
The role of productive activities in the lives of adolescents
Adolescence is an important transitional period, separate from both childhood and adulthood. Critical physical and mental development occurs during adolescence, including emotional skills, physical, and mental abilities. Behaviors adopted during this lifecourse period have critical implications for adolescents' future health and well-being. The main research question of the present study is: what is the role of productive activities in the lives …
Investments in children’s health and the Kenyan cash transfer for orphans and vulnerable children
Child mortality is one of the most pressing global health and policy issues in the developing world. The leading drivers of death-pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria-are preventable and treatable. However, these illnesses are exacerbated by a lack of accessible nutrition, water, basic and preventive health services, and sanitary living conditions-all factors which are more likely to disproportionately impact the poor. We examine whether Kenya's large…
Is Graduation from Social Safety Nets Possible? Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa
In the last decade social cash transfer programmes have become extremely popular in sub-Saharan Africa, and often portrayed as an instrument that can facilitate graduation out of poverty. The evidence on whether social cash transfers have had actual effects on graduation, however, is limited. This paper provides a cross-country reflection of the potential effects of social cash transfers on graduation, drawing from impact evaluation results of ca…
Matching the Gold Standard
We compare nonexperimental impact estimates based on matching methods with those from a randomized evaluation to determine whether the nonexperimental approach can “match” the so‐called gold standard. The social experiment we use was carried out to evaluate a geographically targeted conditional cash transfer antipoverty program in Nicaragua. The outcomes we assess include several components of household expenditure and a variety of children’s hea…
The Determinants of Female Headship in Jamaica
Migration and fuel use in rural Zambia
What is the effect of migration on fuel use in rural Zambia? Opportunities to increase income can be scarce in this setting; in response, households may pursue a migration strategy to increase resources as well as to mitigate risk. Migrant remittances may make it possible for households to shift from primary reliance on firewood to charcoal, and the loss of productive labor through migration may reinforce this shift. This paper uses four waves of…
The Impact of a Large-Scale Poverty-Targeted Cash Transfer Program on Intertemporal Choice
We use a social experiment to test whether the government of Zambia’s cash transfer program affects intertemporal choice. A cash transfer program may also alter expectations about future quality of life and make one happier, two conditions that can affect intertemporal decision-making and the desire to invest in the future. We find that the program affects time discounting and that psychological states are also strongly associated with time disco…
The determinants of teenage schooling in Jamaica
The belief that schooling is an important way to reduce poverty and increase social mobility has lead to large government‐sponsored investment in education in developing countries. Jamaica has an impressive literacy and primary enrolment rate, yet the ability of its secondary school system to enhance social mobility and reduce inequality is limited. Regression results from a nationally representative household survey show that family background v…
The Determinants of Female Headship in Jamaica
Structural adjustment policies, income distribution and poverty
Maternal Education and Child Height
The Welfare Effects of Balance of Payments Reform
This article proposes a methodology for analysing the effect of balance of payments liberalisation on measures of poverty and distribution and applies it to the case of Jamaica in the 1990s. The methodology consists of a macro-micro simulation in which a CGE model provides labour market outcomes, which in turn are used to manipulate the sectoral allocation of employment to generate the income distribution consistent with the new labour market out…
Households, poverty and policy in times of crisis. Mexico, 1992-1996
Before the 1995 crisis. Mexico had registered over a decade of improvements in human development indicators. Using decomposition techniques, this paper measures the benefits of those improvements in terms of allowing households to cope with that crisis. The decline in consumption between 1994 and 1996 is amply explained by the reduction in the returns to household characteristics, with the changes in those characteristics serving to reduce the ne…
The Experience of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America and the Caribbean
This article discusses the experience of six conditional cash transfer programmes in Latin America, a model of social safety‐nets which has grown to dominate the social protection sector in the region during the past decade. While they have been generally successful in terms of achieving their core objective, it is still not clear whether these programmes constitute the most cost‐efficient or sustainable solution to the development bottleneck the…
Examination of facilitators and barriers to home‐based supplemental feeding with ready‐to‐use food for underweight children in western Uganda
Poor complementary feeding practices and low-quality complementary foods are significant causes of growth faltering and child mortality throughout the developing world. Ready-to-use foods (RUF) are energy-dense, lipid-based products that do not require cooking or refrigeration that have been used to prevent and treat malnutrition among vulnerable children. The effectiveness of these products in improving child nutritional status depends on househ…
Matching the Gold Standard
We compare nonexperimental impact estimates based on matching methods with those from a randomized evaluation to determine whether the nonexperimental approach can “match” the so‐called gold standard. The social experiment we use was carried out to evaluate a geographically targeted conditional cash transfer antipoverty program in Nicaragua. The outcomes we assess include several components of household expenditure and a variety of children’s hea…
The Government of Kenya's Cash Transfer Program Reduces the Risk of Sexual Debut among Young People Age 15-25
The aim of this study is to assess whether the Government of Kenya's Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children (Kenya CT-OVC) can reduce the risk of HIV among young people by postponing sexual debut. The program provides an unconditional transfer of US$20 per month directly to the main caregiver in the household. An evaluation of the program was implemented in 2007-2009 in seven districts. Fourteen Locations were randomly assigned to rece…
Cash Transfer Programme, Productive Activities and Labour Supply
This paper reports analysis of the impact of Kenya's Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children Programme on the household decisions on productive activities using data from a randomized experimental design. Results show that the programme had a positive and significant impact on food consumption coming from home production, accumulation of productive assets, especially on the ownership of small livestock and on formation of nonfarm enterp…
Is Graduation from Social Safety Nets Possible? Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa
In the last decade social cash transfer programmes have become extremely popular in sub-Saharan Africa, and often portrayed as an instrument that can facilitate graduation out of poverty. The evidence on whether social cash transfers have had actual effects on graduation, however, is limited. This paper provides a cross-country reflection of the potential effects of social cash transfers on graduation, drawing from impact evaluation results of ca…
Impact of the Kenya Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children on early pregnancy and marriage of adolescent girls
Effects of a Large-Scale Unconditional Cash Transfer Program on Mental Health Outcomes of Young People in Kenya
Social networks, social participation, and health among youth living in extreme poverty in rural Malawi
Impact of the Economic Crisis on Children in Rich Countries
This chapter provides an overview of how the Great Recession affected the economies of the industrialized world and fed through to social spending and to key indicators of child poverty and material deprivation. This sets the context for the in-depth case studies of eleven countries presented in the rest of this volume. The chapter describes macro-economic and labour market trends across forty-one rich countries, reviews changes in child poverty …
Children of Austerity
The 2008 financial crisis triggered the worst global recession since the Great Depression. Many OECD countries responded to the crisis by reducing social spending. Through eleven diverse country case studies (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States), this volume describes the evolution of child poverty and material well-being during the crisis, and links these outcomes with th…
Investments in children’s health and the Kenyan cash transfer for orphans and vulnerable children
Child mortality is one of the most pressing global health and policy issues in the developing world. The leading drivers of death-pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria-are preventable and treatable. However, these illnesses are exacerbated by a lack of accessible nutrition, water, basic and preventive health services, and sanitary living conditions-all factors which are more likely to disproportionately impact the poor. We examine whether Kenya's large…
Poverty and perceived stress
One Plus One can be Greater than Two
This paper investigates the interplay between the Social Cash Transfer Programme (SCTP) and the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) in Malawi. We take advantage of data collected from a seventeen-month evaluation of a sample of households eligible to receive SCTP, which also provided information about inclusion into FISP. We estimate two types of synergies: i) the complementarity between SCTP and FISP, i.e. whether the impact of both intervention…
Household air pollution (HAP), microenvironment and child health
Exposure to household air pollution (HAP) from cooking and heating with solid fuels is major risk factor for morbidity and mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. Children under five are particularly at risk for acute lower respiratory infection. We use baseline data from randomized controlled trial evaluating a household energy intervention in Gisenyi, Rwanda to investigate the role of the microenvironment as a determinant of children's HAP-related hea…
The role of productive activities in the lives of adolescents
Adolescence is an important transitional period, separate from both childhood and adulthood. Critical physical and mental development occurs during adolescence, including emotional skills, physical, and mental abilities. Behaviors adopted during this lifecourse period have critical implications for adolescents' future health and well-being. The main research question of the present study is: what is the role of productive activities in the lives …
Cash Transfers, Early Marriage, and Fertility in Malawi and Zambia
There is increasing interest in the ability of cash transfers to facilitate safe transitions to adulthood in low‐income settings; however, evidence from scaled‐up government programming demonstrating this potential is scarce. Using two experimental evaluations of unconditional cash transfers targeted to ultra‐poor and labor‐constrained households over approximately three years in Malawi and Zambia, we examine whether cash transfers delayed early …
Cash Transfers Enable Households to Cope with Agricultural Production and Price Shocks
Climate change is projected to dramatically disrupt rainfall patterns and agricultural yields in Sub-Saharan Africa. These shocks to food production can mire farming households in poverty traps. This study investigates whether unconditional cash transfers can help households cope with agricultural production and price shocks. We find that cash empowers poor, rural households facing these negative shocks to employ coping strategies typically used …
Early Adoption of an Improved Household Energy System in Urban Rwanda
Economic growth (27 obras) · Economics (26 obras) · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare (24 obras) · Poverty (22 obras) · Cash transfers (16 obras) · Cash (14 obras) · Business (12 obras) · Medicine (11 obras) · Child Nutrition and Water Access (10 obras) · Conditional cash transfer (10 obras)