While female labor force participation (LFP) in Iran is among the lowest in the world, there is hardly any study on the COVID-19 pandemic effects on the country's female LFP. We find that female LFP decreased during the pandemic years by around 1 percentage point in 2021 and 2022. When...

Despite a sizable population and modest status as a low middle-income country, Vietnam has recorded a low COVID-19 fatality rate that rivals those of richer countries with far larger spending on health. We offer an early review of the emerging literatures in public health and economics on the...

Very few studies have examined the impacts of both climate change and air pollution on student education outcomes, particularly in a developing country setting. Analyzing a rich database consisting of household and school surveys, test scores, and temperature and air pollution data over the past...

Monitoring soil quality provides indispensable inputs for effective policy advice, but very few poorer countries can implement high-quality surveys on soil. We offer an alternative, low-cost imputation-based approach to generating various soil quality indicators. The estimation results validate...

Various challenges are thought to render female-headed households (FHHs) vulnerable to poverty in the Arab region. Yet, previous studies have mixed results and the absence of household panel survey data hinders analysis of poverty dynamics. We address these challenges by proposing a novel...

Survey data on household consumption are often unavailable or incomparable over time in many low- and middle-income countries. Based on a unique randomized survey experiment implemented in Tanzania, this study offers new and rigorous evidence demonstrating that survey-to-survey imputation can...

We offer a review of methods that have been employed to provide poverty estimates of poverty in contexts where household consumption data are unavailable or missing. These contexts range from completely missing and partially missing consumption data in cross sectional household surveys, to...

In many developing countries, the increasing public interest in monitoring economic inequality and mobility is hindered by the scarce availability of longitudinal data. Synthetic panels based on matching individuals with the same time-invariant characteristics in consecutive cross-sections have...

Despite being the poorest or second poorest participant, Vietnam performed much better than all other developing countries, and even ahead of wealthier countries such as the U.S. and the U.K., on the 2012 and 2015 PISA assessments. We provide a rigorous investigation of Vietnam's strong...