Abstract
This dataset comes from a clustered randomized controlled trial among Tsimane', a native Amazonian society in Bolivia. The study was funded by NICHD grant # R2 HD050776 to William R. Leonard (PI, Department of Anthropology, Northwestern U) ("Inequality, social capital, and health in Bolivia. 2008"). For the trial, we selected 40 villages for two experimental treatments. In the first treatment, we picked at random 13 villages and gave each village 782kg of edible rice as in-kind income. We split equally the 782kg of rice between all households in the village. For the second treatment, we chose at random another 13 villages, and gave the same amount of rice to each village, but all the rice went to the poorest 20% of households in the village, with each households getting the same amount of rice. All household in the remaining 14 villages and all households in the top 80% of the village income distribution of the second treatment acted as controls, and received 6kg of high-yielding, improved rice seeds. We did the baseline survey during February-May 2008, transferred rice during October 2008-January 2009, and did the end-line survey in February-May 2009. The following publications discuss the methods and results of the trial:
Undurraga, E., Behrman, Jere R., Grigorenko, Elena L., Schultz, Alan, Yiu, Julie, and R. Godoy. 2013. Math skills and market and non-market outcomes: Evidence from an Amazonian society of forager-farmers. Economics of Education Review 37:138-147.
Undurraga, E.A., Behrman, J.R., Leonard, W.R., and R. Godoy. (2016). The effects of community income inequality on health: Evidence from a randomized control trial in the Bolivian Amazon. Social Science & Medicine 149:66-75.
Bauchet, J., Undurraga, E., Zycherman, A., Behrman, J., Leonard, W., & Godoy, R. 2021. The effect of gender targeting of unconditional income transfers on child nutritional status: Experimental evidence from the Bolivian Amazon. Journal of Development Effectiveness. 13:3:276-291