We examine the effect of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), one of the largest workfare programs in the world, on human capital investment. Since NREGS increases labor demand, it could increase the opportunity cost of schooling, lowering human capital investment even as...

This paper uses regression discontinuity design to provide quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of a tax credit program targeted at rural areas in France, including corporate and payroll tax exemptions. We find no impact of the program on total employment or the number of businesses, and...

The productivity of non-farm enterprises in rural Africa may be associated with the productivity of other spatially proximate farm and non-farm enterprises. To test for the presence and significance of such spatial autocorrelation we use data from the geo-referenced 2011 Ethiopian Rural...

We are the first to provide a comparative empirical analysis of non-farm entrepreneurship in rural Africa, using the World Bank's unique LSMSISA dataset. This dataset covers six countries over the period 2005 to 2012. We find that rural enterprises tend to be small, informal household...

Africa is not only the poorest and most rural continent, it is also the most youthful continent in terms of population. Given the large number of young job seekers that will enter the labor market over the next decade, we need a better understanding of rural non-farm entrepreneurship,...

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...

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...

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...

This article contributes to the literature on knowledge transfer via labor mobility by providing new evidence regarding the role of educational diversity in knowledge transfer. In tracing worker flows between firms in Denmark over the period 1995-2005, we find that knowledge carried by workers...

In line with the growing relevance of higher education and science for societal development and innovation processes, there has been a steady increase in the salience of interrelations with the extra-academic environment in the context of academics' work. Insights into the status of this...