Firms in Kenya rely on technologies such as computers, cell-phones, and generators to overcome constraints associated with regulations, infrastructure, security, workforce, corruption, and finance. This study shows that such reliance has significant positive impacts on productivity as measured...

This paper estimates the impacts of mobile broadband coverage on household consumption and poverty in Nigeria, the largest economy and mobile broadband market in Africa. The analysis exploits a unique dataset that integrates three waves of a nationally representative longitudinal household...

Who uses mobile money? What is mobile money used for? This paper describes the mobile money adoption patterns following the experimental introduction of mobile money for the first time in rural areas of Southern Mozambique. We use a combination of administrative and household survey data to...

Mobile broadband internet is the main technology through which individuals access the internet in developing countries. Understanding the barriers to broadband adoption is thus a priority in designing policies aiming to expand access and close the digital divide across socioeconomic groups and...

What are the impacts of expanding mobile broadband coverage on poverty, household consumption and labor market outcomes in developing countries? Who benefits from improved coverage of mobile internet? To respond to these questions, this paper applies a difference-in-differences estimation using...

This paper is the first to estimate the impact of a direct measure of firm-level upstreamness on productivity, wage costs and profits (i.e. productivity-wage gaps). To do so, we merged detailed Belgian linked panel data, covering all years from 2002 to 2010, to a unique data set developed by...

This paper estimates how compliance with national labor law and international labor standards within Jordan's garment exporting factories changed after the implementation of a transparency program that made compliance assessments publicly available. The estimation employs data from Better Work...

We propose the so-called domestic "embodied unit labor costs" (EULC) at the country-sector level as a new cost-related basis for measures of international competitiveness. EULC take into account that a sector's labor costs constitute only a small share of its total cost which to a large extent...

In this study we examine the impact of a value-based insurance design (V-BID) program implemented between 2010 and 2013 at a large public employer in the state of Oregon. The program substantially increased cost-sharing, specifically copayments and coinsurance, for several healthcare services...

This paper presents a novel method for estimating the likely welfare effects of competition reforms for both current and new consumers. Using household budget survey data for 2015/16 for Ethiopia and assuming a reform scenario that dilutes the market share of the state-owned monopoly to 45...