The Gini coefficient of labor earnings in Brazil fell by nearly a fifth between 1995 and 2012, from 0.50 to 0.41. The decline in other measures of earnings inequality was even larger, with the 90-10 percentile ratio falling by almost 40 percent. Applying micro-econometric decomposition techniques, this study parses out the proximate determinants of this substantial reduction in earnings inequality

Zoning laws that restrict rural land to agricultural production pose an important institutional barrier to industrial development. We study the effects of the Industrial Areas (IA) program in Karnataka, India, which rezoned agricultural land for industrial use, but without the economic incentives common with other place-based policies. We find that the program caused a large increase in firm creation

Low levels of investment into modern technologies, and limited use of measures that have low monetary cost but the potential for high yields, are often regarded as obstacles to further agricultural development. This paper investigates farmers’ demand for one such measure, namely agricultural advisory services. These have modest (most frequently zero) monetary user cost but, according to some recent

AbstractThis article offers an overview of some key conceptual aspects associated with the rise of global value chains (GVCs). It outlines a series of alternative interpretations and definitions of what the rise of GVCs entails, and it traces the implications of these alternative conceptualizations for the measurement of the phenomenon, as well as for elucidating the key determinants and implications

Intra-household inequalities have long been a source of concern for policy design, but there is very little evidence. The current practice of ignoring inequality within households could lead to an underestimation of both overall inequality and poverty levels, as well as to the misclassification of some individuals as regards to their poverty status. Using a novel survey for Senegal in which consumption

This article documents a positive and sizable correlation between the location of historical Christian missions and the allocation of present-day World Bank aid at the grid-cell level in Africa. The correlation is robust to an extensive set of geographical and historical control variables that predict settlement of missions. The study finds no correlation with aid effectiveness, as measured by project

AbstractThis article sheds light on the impact on household investment efficiency of a social norm that a man should not earn less than his wife. The experiment distinguishes this impact from that of spouses’ desire for control over household resources. Both husbands and wives are found to sacrifice household income (efficiency) for greater control; but, consistent with this social norm, husbands alone

The challenges associated with poverty measurement with a cardinal variable have received due attention during the last four decades, but there is a dearth of literature studying how to meaningfully assess poverty with an ordinal variable. This paper first proposes a class of simple, intuitive and policy-relevant poverty measures for ordinal variables. These measures are sensitive to depth of deprivations

The Global Findex database is the world's most comprehensive set of data on how people make payments, save money, borrow and manage risk. Launched in 2011, it includes more than 100 financial inclu...

Tanzania's rapid labor productivity growth has been accompanied by a proliferation of small, largely informal firms. Using Tanzania's first nationally representative survey of micro, small, and med...

Modern availability of rich geospatial datasets and analysis tools can provide insight germane to the design of field experiments. Design of field experiments, and in particular the choice of sampl...

Despite billions of dollars spent by policy institutions and academics, very few programs designed to increase managerial skills among microenterprises are cost-effective. This short paper highligh...

We suggest new evidence on minimum age regulations using a natural experiment. In 1998, a constitutional reform has changed the minimum working age from 14 to 16 in Brazil. The reform was the legislative counterpart of a broad set of measures taken by a government strongly committed to fighting child labor. We document the fact that enforcement and compliance may have been heterogeneous across regions

We test the long-standing hypothesis that agricultural households in low-income contexts engage in intermittent enterprise activity as a way to mitigate shocks. We link panel data on smallholder coffee farmers in Tanzania with a time series of global coffee prices. We first verify that global coffee prices matter for these households, through their effects on farmgate prices, quantity of coffee sold

Over the coming decade, much more genetic data will enter into the study of economic development. This paper provides an example and emphasizes the uses and misuses of such information. It has asse...

This paper compares costs of living across world cities. The International Comparison Program (ICP) reports price levels across world economies in its calculation of purchasing power parity through...

In Sub-Saharan Africa, individuals frequently transfer a substantial share of their resources to members of their social networks. Social pressure to redistribute, however, can induce disincentive ...

This study exploits contract-level data from Bosnia and Herzegovina to assess the impact of a new credit registry on the use of borrower collateral versus third-party guarantees. Among first-time b...

This paper investigates the impact of management training programs on garment clusters in Vietnam and Tanzania. The study found that in the medium run firms showed improvement once they had identif...

Short-term human mobility has important health consequences, but measuring short-term movement using survey data is difficult and costly, and use of mobile phone data to study short-term movement is only possible in locations that can access the data. Combining several accessible data sources, Senegal is used as a case study to predict short-term movement within the country. The focus is on two main

This paper analyzes millions of credit card transaction records during several months for tens of thousands of individuals from two different countries. The study shows that, purchase patterns are ...

This study analyzes the effects of differences in survey frequency and medium on microenterprise survey data. A sample of enterprises were randomly assigned to monthly in-person, weekly in-person, or weekly phone surveys for a 12-week panel. The results show few differences across the groups in measured means, distributions, and deviations of measured data from an objective data-quality standard provided

This paper explores the relationship between linguistic diversity and the stock of health information in society. Information is measured using individual-level knowledge about the oral rehydration...

AbstractPost-election violence is a common form of conflict, but its underlying mechanisms are not well understood. Using data from the 2007 Philippine mayoral elections, this paper provides evidence that post-election violence is particularly intense after narrow victories by incumbents. Using a density test, the study shows that incumbents were substantially more likely to win narrow victories than

AbstractThe impact of national efforts to increase supply of education, such as Nepal’s National Education System Plan, may vary across social groups due to differences in social factors that determine access to and demand for education. This paper studies the heterogeneous impact of this reform across gender and caste groups—two important social dimensions in Nepal’s context—over two generations.

One of the most commonly cited obstacles to firms’ operations in developing economies is inadequate access to electricity. In this paper, we explore the impact of electricity outages on firm productivity using arguably exogenous variation in outages across small and mediumsized Ghanaian manufacturing firms induced by an electricity rationing program. We find that eliminating outages in this setting

AbstractCash transfer programs are rapidly becoming a key component of the social safety net of many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The primary aim of these programs is to help households improve their food security and to smooth consumption during periods of economic duress. However, beneficiary households have also been shown to use these programs to expand their microentrepreneurial activities

AbstractThis paper studies periods of prolonged contractions in output per capita in a sample of 145 countries from 1950 to 2014. Economic slumps are defined as abrupt interruptions of a period of growth by several regime switches. Slumps start with a sharp contraction along with a trend break, which is followed by another switch when growth stabilizes again. The paper then analyzes the correlates

AbstractThis study employs a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to study the causal impacts of free primary education (FPE) on women’s schooling and fertility-related outcomes using the 1990s FPE reform of Malawi. The results show that full exposure to FPE at the mean value of the reform’s potential impact led to an 18.5 percentage points increase in the probability of ever enrolling in

AbstractThis study analyzes impacts of large, one-time cash transfers and farm management plans among farmers in Senegal. Farmers were randomized into groups receiving advisory visits; the visits and an individualized farm management plan; or the visits, the plan, and a cash transfer. After one year, crop production and livestock ownership were higher in the transfer group relative to the group that

AbstractThis study uses incentive-compatible techniques to obtain valuations of 14 common poverty reduction interventions from (probable) aid recipients. Recipients’ valuations for these interventions are highly heterogeneous both across interventions and across recipients of the same intervention. Valuation for interventions does not correlate with overall poverty or with perceived need for specific

Infant mortality among Hindus is higher than among Muslims in India, and religious differences in sanitation practices have been cited as a contributing factor. To explore whether religion itself is associated with differences in sanitation practices, this study compares sanitation practices of Hindus and Muslims living in the same locations using three nationally-representative data sets from India