Using a new survey, we show that the dispersion of marginal products across firms in the European Union is about twice as large as that in the United States. Reducing it to the US level would increase EU GDP by more than 30 percent. Alternatively, removing barriers between industries and...
The aim of this paper is to investigate the growth dynamics of young small firms (in contrast with larger and older incumbents) in a developing country context, using a unique and comprehensive dataset of non-agricultural Tunisian companies. Our results suggest that significant differences between young and mature firms can be...
Women in the MENA region are economically and socially disempowered. High youth unemployment rates together with discriminatory social norms drive them to limit their investment in human capital. We evaluate a large-scale intervention attempting to relax human capital constraints for women by offering vocational, business and life skills training in...
We investigate whether legislation of equal inheritance rights for women modifies the historic preference for sons in India, and find that it exacerbates it. Children born after the reform in families with a first-born daughter are 3.8–4.3 percentage points less likely to be girls, indicating that the reform encouraged female...
This analysis is motivated by recognition that anti-poverty interventions often affect both the level and composition of assets held by beneficiaries. To assess the conventional view that assets uniformly improve childhood development through wealth effects, we use three waves of panel data from Tanzania and test whether different types of...
In this paper, we make an attempt to understand whether low labour market returns to education in India are responsible for low female work participation. The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) Employment Unemployment Survey (EUS) unit level data of India for the year 2011–12 is used to examine the relationship...
We explore the micro-foundations of fragility by discussing how to measure the exposure to fragility at the individual level. We focus on two notions that are not covered by existing aggregate, state-centric indicators of fragility. First, different individuals may experience fragility very differently. Second, even though a country as a...
Can a society suffering contests between rich and poor achieve good governance in the face of endemic corruption? We examine a stylized poor state with weak institutions in which a "culture of evasion" damages state authority. Many evade tax payments, limiting the state's economic development capability. In the face of...
In 2013, the Government of Indonesia conducted one of the largest information interventions in histo-ry, in an attempt to further alleviate poverty and as a complement to the Social Protection Card (KPS). Drawing upon administrative data and nationally representative surveys, we evaluate the impact of the information campaign on the...
Driven by rapid income growth, labor market transitions in the nature of jobs, and lifestyle factors, there has been a widespread increase in rates of overweight and obesity in many countries. This paper examines the effect of occupational engagement and work intensity on the weight of urban working women and...
We study the long-run impacts of health insurance promotion in Northern Ghana. We randomly provide three overlapping interventions to promote enrollment: subsidy, information campaign, and convenient sign-up option, with follow-up surveys seven months and three years after the initial intervention. Our interventions, especially the subsidy, promote enrollment and healthcare service...
This paper investigates an alternative proxy for individual worker productivity in physical work settings: a direct measure of physical activity using an accelerometer. First, the paper compares worker labor outcomes, such as labor supply and daily productivity obtained from firm personnel data, with physical activity; they are strongly related. Second,...
A large number of empirical studies have investigated the link between social status and happiness, yet in observational data identification challenges remain severe. This study exploits the fact that in India people are assigned a caste from birth. Two identical surveys of household heads (each with N=1000) in rural Punjab...
We examine how overall delivery of public goods (i.e., efficiency) is affected by affirmative action in elections, i.e., restricting candidate entry in elections to one population group. We argue that when group identities are salient, such restrictions on candidate entry need not necessarily reduce electoral competition. In fact, when group...
Despite the large individual benefits of guest work by the poor in rich countries, agencies charged with global poverty reduction do little to facilitate guest work. This may be because guest work is viewed as a repugnant transaction – one whose harmful side-effects might cause third parties to discourage it....
We investigate the long-term effects of households' exposure to violent conflict on children's educational attainment in primary school, studying cognitive and non-cognitive skills as possible causal channels. Our identification strategy exploits the locality-level variation in the intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the West Bank during the Second Intifada (2000–2005)....
This paper investigates the crowding out of informal support among peers by the introduction of formal insurance. We show that the availability of insurance changes people's intrinsic motivation to support others. We report results from a lab-in-the-field experiment conducted in Cambodia. Half of the subjects face the risk to lose...
Combining nationally representative administrative and survey data with official proxy means testing models and coefficients, we evaluate Indonesia's three largest social programs. The setting for our evaluation is the launch of Indonesia's Unified Targeting system, an innovation developed to reduce targeting errors and increase program complementarities. Introducing a new method...
We analyze long-term impacts of the 1967-1970 Nigerian Civil War, providing the first evidence of intergenerational impacts. Women exposed to the war in their growing years exhibit reduced adult stature, increased likelihood of being overweight, earlier age at first birth, and lower educational attainment. Exposure to a primary education program...
In this study we experimentally investigate whether solidarity, which is a crucial base for informal insurance arrangements in developing countries, is sensitive to the extent to which individuals can influence their risk exposure. With slum dwellers of Nairobi our design measures subjects' willingness to share income with a worse-off partner...