We use the nation-wide policy of randomly allocating village council headships to women to identify the impact of female political leadership on the governance of projects implemented under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India. Using primary survey data, we find more program...

Neighborhoods are the result of a complicated interplay between residential choice, housing supply and the influences of the larger metropolitan system on its constituent parts. We model this interplay as a system of reduced-form equations in order to examine the effects of a generous spatially...

In this article we study the relationship between workers' remittances and fertility rate of the remittance receiving country. We identify two main channels by which remittances transfers affect fertility. First, migrants may adopt and later transmit to the household the ideas, values and...

The historical pattern of the demographic transition suggests that fertility declines follow mortality declines, followed by a rise in human capital accumulation and economic growth. The HIV/AIDS epidemic threatens to reverse this path. A recent paper by Young (2005), however, suggests that...

This paper investigates cyclicality in women's labour supply motivated by the hypothesis that it contributes to smoothing household consumption in environments characterized by income volatility. We use comparable individual data on about 1.1 million women in 63 developing and transition...

Primary school enrolment rates are very low in francophone Africa. In order to enhance education supply, many countries have launched large teacher recruitment programmes in recent years, whereby teachers are no longer engaged on civil servant positions, but on the basis of (fixed-term)...

Economic reasons along with cultural affinities and the existence of networks have been the main determinants explaining migration flows between home and host countries. This paper reconsiders these approaches combined with the gravity model and empirically tests the hypothesis that ex-colonial...

This paper adopts a labor market economics perspective to understanding the crisis of health care professionals in Africa. Five challenges resulting from this crisis are identified: a production challenge, an underutilization challenge, a distributional challenge, a performance challenge, and a...

Limited access of entrepreneurs to credit constrains the creation and growth of private firms. In Africa, access to credit is particularly limited for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) due to unclear property rights and the lack of assets that can be used as collateral. This paper presents a...

In recent years, the private sector has been recognized as a key engine of Africa's economic development. Yet, the most simple and fundamental question remains unanswered: how large is the African private sector? We present novel estimates of the size of the private sector in 50 African...