It is known that Muslim women in Nigeria have significantly worse nutritional status than their Christian counterparts. The paper first shows that this difference is explained by covariates including geographic location, ethnicity, household wealth, and women's education. However, on accounting...

This paper looks at the determinants of secondary school attendance in Bangladesh with a focus on the interaction between community gender norms and relative supply of madrasas (i.e. Islamic schools). We present a theoretical framework where the probability of children's school participation...

The paper analyzes the impact of an experimental maternal and child health and family-planning program that was implemented in Matlab, Bangladesh in 1977. Village data from 1974, 1982 and 1996 suggest that program villages experienced extra declines in fertility of about 17%. Household data from...

BRAC, a non-governmental organization (NGO), runs a large number of non-formal primary schools in Bangladesh which target out-of-school children from poor families. These schools are well-known for their effectiveness in closing gender gap in primary school enrollment. On the other hand,...

We study the effects of explosive growth in the Bangladeshi ready-made garments industry on the lives on Bangladeshi women. We compare the marriage, childbearing, school enrollment and employment decisions of women who gain greater access to garment sector jobs to women living further away from...

This paper studies foreign direct investment spillovers on the gender-related labor market practices of domestic firms, based on a unique firm-to-firm data set of Bangladesh's textiles and garment sectors. The paper looks at the female employment of domestic firms that are directly and...

Previous research has examined the incidence and correlates of contraceptive use and of several dimensions of female autonomy but only rarely the intersection of the two: female contraceptive use autonomy (CUA). Using a nationally representative household survey for two cohorts of married women,...

In low- and middle-income countries, differences between men and women in their time use patterns represent a major source of gender inequality. Among other factors, natural shocks can contribute to the widening of these differences. This paper examines the impact of the 2017 flood in Bangladesh...