Research 

We randomly offered a childcare subsidy, an equivalent cash grant, or both to mothers of three-to-five-year-old children in Uganda. We find evidence of long-lasting effects of all interventions on the children's anthropometric outcomes, as measured up to four years after the intervention.

We randomly offered a childcare subsidy, an equivalent cash grant, or both to mothers of three-to-five-year-old children. The childcare subsidy substantially increased labor supply and earnings of single mothers, highlighting the importance of time constraints for them. Among couples, childcare did not affect mothers' labor market outcomes but instead increased fathers' salaried employment. At the household level, childcare led to higher income, consumption and improved child development. Cash grants positively affected mothers' labor supply and income irrespective of the household structure, suggesting the general importance of credit constraints for women's business development.

Many countries have implemented cash transfers to mitigate the negative economic and social consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. There is, however, little evidence on the effectiveness of such policies in times of crisis. This paper reports from a study evaluating the impact of cash transfers to female household heads in Uganda during the Covid lockdown and one year after. We show that the cash transfer was successful in mitigating a sharp, but relatively short-lived, economic downturn, and in inducing a persistent, positive effect on household income and savings. We find no evidence of a negative male backlash from the cash transfer. 

Poverty is often understood in exclusively monetary terms. Despite recent advances in including other dimensions of well-being, one dimension that is still often overlooked is time. This is problematic for two reasons: First, free time in itself is an important part of individual well-being. Second, the direct trade-off between free time and income makes poverty measures that consider only one side of this trade-off biased and policies resulting from this potentially inefficient. The aim of this study is therefore twofold. First, to develop a measure of poverty that accounts for both time and money. Second, to take this measure to the data and examine the prevalence of different poverty regimes in the population and in particular the transitions between them over time. I use data from Uganda and show that monetary poor individuals who are also time poor, or at the risk of becoming time poor, have a significantly lower likelihood of transitioning out of poverty compared to equally monetary poor households with sufficient time. Females are particularly likely to be dual poor.

Diversity and in particular fractionalization has been shown to be a major obstacle for development and a potential source of inter-group conflict. While much of the existing evidence is based on ethnic or linguistic demarcations of groups, less attention has been attributed to other dimensions, such as the prevailing narratives within and across groups. In this paper, I develop measures of narrative diversity, based on the amount of Folklore that ethnolinguistic groups share with each other. I examine the relationship between narrative diversity and conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa during the time period between 1960 and 2020. I differentiate between a wide range of conflict events, ranging from peaceful protests to civil wars and account for changes in diversity over time. I find a strong relationship between polarization and armed conflict on the country-level, while fractionalization is more predictive of low-intensity and localized conflict events, in particular when measured at sub-national levels. I suggest that these differences can partly be explained by differences in the likelihood of groups to interact and the political system in place.