This paper argues that the level of financial services provision determines the risk management strategies among the poor. The paper estimates the determinants of the household's use of one, two or all three types of microfinancial services applying ordered probit models and additionally probit...

This paper investigates the nonprofit wage gap suggesting a theoretical framework where, like in Akerlof (1984), effort correlates not only with wages, but also with non-monetary compensations. These take the form of relational goods and services by-produced in the delivery of particular...

We propose a model to evaluate the U.K.'s zero-hours contract (ZHC) - a contract that exempts employers from the requirement to provide any minimum working hours, and allows employees to decline any workload. We find quantitatively that ZHCs improve welfare by enabling firms with more volatile...

In Germany, the productivity of professional services, a sector dominated by micro and small firms, declined by 40 percent between 1995 and 2014. This productivity decline also holds true for professional services in other European countries. Using a German firm-level dataset of 700,000...

Employee referrals are a very common means by which firms hire new workers. Past work suggests that workers hired via referrals often perform better than non-referred workers, but we have little understanding as to why. In this paper, we demonstrate that this is primarily because referrals allow...

This study proposes new family-centered measures of access to early care and education (ECE) services with respect to quantity, cost, and quality and uses them to assess disparities in access across locations and socio-demographic groups in Minnesota. These measures are distance-based and use...

We study gender differences in decision-making strategy when applying for college using applications data for all college applicants in Ireland over the 2015-17 period. Detailed information on high school subjects and grades enable us to examine how the college choices of equally achieving...

This article reviews the literature on the economic impacts of disasters caused by extreme weather and climate events to draw lessons on how societies can better manage these risks. While evidence that richer, better governed societies suffer less and recover faster from climate extremes...

We analyze linked databases on all Small Business Administration (SBA) loans, on all SBA lenders, and on all U.S. employers to estimate the effects of financial access on employment growth. Our methods combine regressions with matching on firm age, size, industry, year, and employment history,...