We analyse the effect of parental risk preferences and a novel measure of maternal bargaining power over educational expenses - elicited via lab-in-the-field experiments in rural Côte d'Ivoire on the educational progression of boys and girls. Data from 135 couples and their children show that...

This paper revisits the causes behind child labor supply by focusing on an aspect that has received little attention: the link between the household head's risk and time preferences and observed child labor supply. We develop a theoretical model and empirically test for this causality using data...

Is the impact of women's bargaining power on the welfare of the household always positive? We address this question by developing a novel experimental measure of bargaining power over family expenditures in Ivory Coast and studying its determinants. We find that men prioritise food expenditures,...

We are the first to provide a comparative empirical analysis of non-farm entrepreneurship in rural Africa, using the World Bank's unique LSMSISA dataset. This dataset covers six countries over the period 2005 to 2012. We find that rural enterprises tend to be small, informal household...

Africa is not only the poorest and most rural continent, it is also the most youthful continent in terms of population. Given the large number of young job seekers that will enter the labor market over the next decade, we need a better understanding of rural non-farm entrepreneurship,...

Although non-farm enterprises are ubiquitous in rural Sub-Saharan Africa, little is yet known about their productivity. In this paper we contribute to filling this gap by providing estimates of labor productivity in enterprises for Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda. Using the World Bank's...

This paper studies the effect of competition on ethnic discrimination by carrying out a field experiment in the context of the rice market in Bangladesh. We recruit professional rice buyers (middlemen) to act as judges in a rice competition by providing a quality rating and a price quote for...

The salience of the first Covid-19 crisis over a well-identified period makes it an unexpected and abrupt change in the environment. This study uses the onset of the Covid-19 crisis to empirically examine whether risk and time preferences change in response to this exogenous shock, and whether...

This paper provides a systematic analysis of the way shifts in property utilization rights in China induced another sequence of institutional changes that led to the rise of rural-urban labor migration from 1980 to 1984, a critical period in the country's market transition. I show that the...

Many developed countries have recently experienced a significant inflow of immigrants in the agricultural sector. At the same time, the sector is still in a process of structural transformation resulting in fewer but bigger and presumably more efficient farms. In this paper, we exploit detailed...