Blended finance---the use of public and philanthropic funding to crowd in private capital---is a potential way to finance a more sustainable world. While blended finance holds the promise of being catalytic in mobilizing vast amounts of private capital, little is known about this practice. In...

Mental health conditions are prevalent but rarely treated in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Little is known about how these conditions affect economic participation. This paper shows that treating mental health conditions substantially improves recipients' capacity to work in these...

The mental health of the elderly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is a largely neglected subject, both by policy and research. We combine data from the health and retirement family of surveys in seven LMICs (plus the US) to document that depressive symptoms among those aged 55 and...

Between 1880 and 1920, the US agricultural employment share fell from 50% to 25%. However, despite aggregate demand shifting away from their sector of specialization, rural labor markets saw faster wage growth and industrialization than non-agricultural parts of the US. We propose a spatial...

Developing country megacities suffer from severe road traffic congestion, yet the level of congestion is not a direct measure of equilibrium inefficiency. I study the peak-hour traffic congestion equilibrium in Bangalore. To measure travel preferences, I use a model of departure time choice to...

1. The World Bank and Wolfensohn era reforms -- 2. The ABCs of the World Bank -- 3. A framework for modeling Bank behavior -- 4. The dynamics of epistemic economic change -- 5. Application to debt relief, participation and knowledge -- 6. Application to social capital -- 7. Application to...

"The Elgar Companion to The World Bank provides a comprehensive review of the past 80 years for this powerful development institution. Bringing together different theoretical approaches to studying the Bank from an expert group of scholars as well as insights from development practitioners, it...

We study the intergenerational persistence of inequality by estimating grandmother-mother associations in the loss of a child, using pooled data from 119 Demographic and Health Surveys in 44 developing countries. Compared with compatriots of the same age, women with at least one sibling who died...

Antipoverty policies assume that targeting poor households suffices in reaching poor individuals. We question this assumption. Our comprehensive assessment for sub-Saharan Africa reveals that undernourished women and children are spread widely across the household wealth and consumption...

This paper studies how aggregate economic conditions affect marriage markets in developing countries where marriage is regulated by traditional customary norms. We examine how local economic shocks influence the timing of marriage, and particularly child marriage, in Sub-Saharan Africa and in...