Not all countries provide universal access to publicly funded paid sick pay. Amongst countries that do, compensation rates can be low and coverage incomplete. This leaves a significant role for employer-provided paid sick pay in many countries. In this paper, we study who has access to...

Market completeness has important implications for household behavior. I firmly reject complete markets for smallholders but am unable to do so for non-smallholders. This leads to important differences in production behavior: smallholders reallocate labor across activities less in response to...

Theories of how nonunion employee representation impacts firm performance, affects market equilibria, and generates externalities on labor and society are synthesized. Mandated works councils in Germany provide a particularly strong form of nonunion employee representation. A systematic review...

The paper explores the consequences of macroeconomic policy for labor market outcomes in the presence of frictions. It shows how policy may be useful in overriding frictions, as well as how it might generate adverse outcomes. The analysis looks at the main tools of macroeconomic policy and...

Managing rapid population growth and spurring economic growth are among the most pressing policy challenges for Sub-Saharan Africa. We discuss the links between them and investigate the potential of family planning programs to address these challenges. Specifically, we estimate the impact of...

Although non-farm enterprises are ubiquitous in rural Sub-Saharan Africa, little is yet known about their productivity. In this paper we contribute to filling this gap by providing estimates of labor productivity in enterprises for Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda. Using the World Bank's...

This paper investigates the consequences of prenatal exposure to hot temperatures on child health in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) using a novel indicator of heat waves (the Heat Wave Magnitude Index daily). Leveraging several geo-referenced waves of the Demographic and Health Surveys merged with...

In this paper, we identify under which conditions and to what extent armed conflicts harm the long-run educational attainment of children in rural Sub-Saharan Africa. By combining 66 rounds of DHS surveys with geo-coded conflict information, our study contextualizes the findings of a series of...

We study the effects of preschool attendance on children's school progression and cognitive skills in Kenya and Tanzania. Our analysis uses novel data from large-scale household surveys of children's literacy and numeracy skills, which also collect retrospective information on preschool...

We study the role of proximity to historical ethnic borders in determining individual land ownership in Sub-Saharan Africa. Following an instrumental variable strategy, we document that individuals have a lower likelihood of owning land near historical ethnic borders. In particular, the...