We study the role of professional networks in facilitating the escape of persecuted academics from Nazi Germany. From 1933, the Nazi regime started to dismiss academics of Jewish origin from their positions. The timing of dismissals created individual-level exogenous variation in the timing of...

This paper explores a new theoretical and empirical approach to the assessment of human well-being, relevant to current challenges of social fragmentation in the presence of globalization and technological advance. We present two indexes of well-being – solidarity (S) and agency (A) – to be...

We estimate trends in global earnings dispersion across occupational groups using a new database covering 66 developed and developing countries between 1970 and 2015. Our main finding is that global earnings inequality has declined, primarily during the 2000s, when the global Gini coefficient...

The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the international poverty line. In order to preserve the integrity of the goalposts for international targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the World Bank's twin...

With the recent release of the 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP) data from the International Comparison Program (ICP), analysts and institutions are confronted with the question of whether and how to use them for global poverty estimation. The previous round of PPP data from 2005 led to a large...

We study how attendance rates of primary school children respond to cost neutral changes in the design of India's school meal program. Municipal schools in the capital region of Delhi switched from packaged food to on-site cooked meals in 2003, with insignificant changes in the budget available...

Industrialization is vital for inclusive and sustainable global development. The two engines of industrialization – innovation and trade – are in danger of being compromised by the COVID-19 pandemic, under conditions increasingly reminiscent of the medieval world. It comes at a...

This paper uses matched employer-employee panel data to show that individual jobsatisfaction is higher when other workers in the same establishment are better-paid. Thisruns contrary to a large literature which has found evidence of income comparisons insubjective well-being...

Labor market programs may affect unemployed individuals' behavior before they enroll. Such ex ante effects may differ according to ethnic origin. We apply a novel method that relates self-reported perceived treatment rates and job search behavioral outcomes, such as the reservation wage or...

We develop entrepreneurship and institutional theory to explain variation in different types of entrepreneurship across individuals and institutional contexts. Our framework generates hypotheses about the negative impact of higher levels of corruption, weaker property rights and especially...