This paper studies how a positive export shock - the sharp increase in garment-sector exports that began at the end of the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) - spread through Bangladesh's labor markets. Although the end of the MFA was arguably exogenous to Bangladesh, we instrument export demand with...

This paper studies the impact of climate change on the nutritional status of very young children between the ages of 0 3 years by using weather data from the last half century merged with rich information on child, mother and household characteristics in rural coastal Bangladesh. We evaluate the...

This paper uses worldwide firm-level data to scrutinize the governance factors that favor gender diversity in leadership positions. Our results reveal that the gender of the dominant shareholder is key. The chief executive of firms with a female dominant shareholder has a significantly higher...

Our analysis of a rich representative household survey for Malawi, where patrilineal and matrilineal institutions coexist, suggests that (a) in matrilineal societies the likelihood of cash crop cultivation by a household increases with the extent of land owned (or de facto controlled) by males,...

We analyze the economic consequences for less developed countries of investing in female health. In so doing we introduce a novel micro-founded dynamic general equilibrium framework in which parents trade off the number of children against investments in their education and in which we allow for...

Two trends in international migration flows have attracted much attention recently: (i) the growing feminisation of migration flows; and (ii) the increasing selectivity of migration towards the highly skilled, which in turn has given rise to renewed concerns about the "brain drain" consequences...

The book focuses on the linkages between institutions, inequality and development. It analyzes formal political institutions, in particular the relationship between democracy and human development. It also centers on informal social institutions leading to the exclusion of population groups such...

This paper analyses the difference in short-term employment recovery between young men and women in India, Peru and Vietnam following the national lockdowns imposed in all three countries during 2020. We employ a mediation model to establish whether - and to what extent commonly suggested...