Panel data are rarely available for developing countries. Departing from traditional pseudo-panel methods that require multiple rounds of cross-sectional data to study poverty mobility at the cohort level, we develop a procedure that works with as few as two survey rounds and produces point...

Egypt and Tunisia are perceived to have high levels of inequality, yet based on standard measures, inequality in these two countries is not unusually high. In this study we explore a new dimension of inequality in Egypt and Tunisia by using a more complete measure of income and decomposing...

We empirically examine whether violation of hypergamy - which occurs when the wife's economic status equals or exceeds that of her husband's - causally affects domestic violence using microdata from India. Identifying the causal effect of hypergamy violation on domestic violence, however, is...

In this study, we find that the negative effect of unexploded ordnance (UXO) on the geographical density of foreign direct investment and large firms is a new channel through which the war legacy impedes local development in Vietnam. A 1% increase in the proportion of UXO-contaminated area leads...

We assess, via an experiment across 207 secondary schools, how a comprehensive teacher training program affects the delivery of a major entrepreneurship curriculum reform in Rwanda. The reform introduced interactive pedagogy and a focus on business skills in the country’s required upper...

Can a society suffering contests between rich and poor achieve good governance in the face of endemic corruption? We examine a stylized poor state with weak institutions in which a "culture of evasion" damages state authority. Many evade tax payments, limiting the state's economic development...

In this paper, we make an attempt to understand whether low labour market returns to education in India are responsible for low female work participation. The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) Employment Unemployment Survey (EUS) unit level data of India for the year 2011-12 is used to...

The persistently high employment share of the informal sector makes entrepreneurship a necessity for youth in many developing countries. We exploit exogenous variation in the implementation of Rwanda's entrepreneurship education reform in secondary schools to evaluate its effect on student...