Why is it that couples who have a son or whose last child is a son earn higher conditional income?  To solve this curious case we tell a detective story: evidence of a phenomenon to be explained, a parade of suspects, a process of elimination from the enquiry, and then the denouement.  Given...

This paper revisits the issue of the intra-household of education with the recently available India Human Development Survey which refers to 2005 and covers both urban and rural areas.  In addition to the traditional Engel method, the paper utilizes a Hurdle model to disentangle the decision to...

Pakistan has very large gender gaps in educational outcomes. While this suggests that girls may receive lower educational expenditure allocations than boys within households, this has never convincingly been tested. This paper investigates whether the intra-household allocation of educational...

The move to a more market-oriented economy is associated with evidence of increased inequality in the incomes earned by men and women. The context of our study of this question is the recent large-scale reform of the inefficient state sector, which has caused layoffs of urban workers that...

South Africa’s unemployment rate is one of the highest in the world, and it has important distributional implications. The paper examines the incidence of unemployment using two national household surveys for the mid-1990s. Both entry to unemployment and the duration of unemployment are...

We conduct a field experiment to investigate employers' trust in workers.  A sample of real entrepreneurs and workers from urban Ghana are respectively assigned to the roles of employers and employees.  Employers have the option to hire (trust) an employee, who can in turn choose whether to...

In Ghana there is a highly developed apprenticeship system where young men and women undertake sector-specific private training, which yields skills used primarily in the informal sector.  In this paper we use a 2006 urban based household survey with detailed questions on the background,...

Economists have traditionally assumed that individual behavior is motivated exclusively by extrinsic incentives.  Social physchologists, in contrast, stress that intrinsic motivations are also important.  In recent work, economic theorists have started to build psychological factors, like...

Vocational training systems differ markedly between countries. A model of firm-based human capital investment predicts equilibria characterised by particular patterns of training and job-to-job mobility, consistent with observed cross-country differences. Incentives to invest in human capital...

We use a sharp, exogenous and repeated change in the value of leisure to identify the impact of student effort on educational achievement.  The treatment arises from the partial overlap of the world's major international football tournaments with the exam period in England.  Our data enable a...