"This paper examines the ways in which lower-income households obtain basic financial services in urban communities in Mexico and the United States. And it discusses the efforts that private sector and government organizations are making to lower the cost or improve the quality of those...

"Wu focuses on how urban policies and the clustering of creative industries has influenced urban outcomes. The set of creative industries include those with output protectable under some form of intellectual property law. More specifically, this subsector encompasses software, multimedia, video...

This note shows the results of the "Clean Air Initiative in Sub-Saharan African Cities," a study to evaluate air pollution launched and coordinated by the World Bank. The following items are addressed: (i) estimation of the present global level of air pollution in Cotonou; (ii) determination of...

Urban sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Brazilian cities are growing. At the national level, the dominance of greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation in Brazil masks the fact that emissions from other sectors, like Energy, Transport and Waste, are growing quite rapidly in cities....

"This paper relies on a simple framework to understand the gender wage gap in Macedonia, and simulates how the gender wage gap would behave after the introduction of a minimum wage. First, it presents a new - albeit simple - decomposition of the wage gap into three factors: (i) a wage level...

"This paper identifies and estimates the strength of the reduction in poverty linked to improved opportunities for women in the expanding maquila sector. A simulation exercise shows that, at a given point in time, poverty in Honduras would have been 1.5 percentage points higher had the maquila...

"The authors use firm-level survey data from the manufacturing sector in 20 Sub-Saharan African countries to explore the links between labor market regulations and net job creation. A first look at firm characteristics, perceptions, and the dynamics of employment at the firm level suggests that...