The impact of school resources on the quality of education in developing countries may depend crucially on whether resources are targeted efficiently. In this paper we use a randomized experiment to analyze the impact of a school grants program in Senegal, which decentralized a portion of the...

This paper studies how targeted cash transfers to women affect their empowerment. We use a novel identification strategy to measure women's willingness to pay to receive cash transfers instead of their partner receiving it. We apply this among women living in poor households in urban Macedonia....

This paper studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on the structure of household expenditures on non-durables. We study a policy intervention in the Republic of Macedonia, offering cash transfers to poor households, conditional on having their children...

This study examines the impact of publicly provided daycare for children aged 0-3 on outcomes of children and their caregivers over the course of seven years after enrollment into daycare. At the end of 2007, the city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil used a lottery to assign children to limited...

This paper presents a life-cycle model of woman's labour supply, human capital formation and savings for the evaluation of welfare-to-work and tax policies. Women's decisions are formalised in a dynamic and uncertain environment. The model includes a detailed characterisation of the tax system...

It is often argued that informal labour markets in developing countries are the engine of growth because their existence allows firms to operate in an environment where wage and regulatory costs are lower. On the other hand informality means that the amount of social protection offered to...

This paper analyzes the career progression of skilled and unskilled workers, with a focus on how careers are affected by economic downturns and whether formal skills, acquired early on, can shield workers from the effect of recessions. Using detailed administrative data for Germany for numerous...

We develop an equilibrium lifecycle model of education, marriage and labor supply and consumption in a transferable utility context. Individuals start by choosing their investments in education anticipating returns in the marriage market and the labor market. They then match based on the...

We study the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children's cognitive achievement, behavioral problems, grade repetition and obesity. We address the endogeneity of maternal schooling by instrumenting it with variation in schooling costs during the mother's adolescence. Using...