This paper documents the evolving impact of childbearing on the work activity of mothers between 1787 and 2014. It is based on a compiled data set of 429 censuses and surveys, representing 101 countries and 46.9 million mothers, using the International and U.S. IPUMS, the North Atlantic...

Does financial development facilitate micro-entrepreneurship? Using randomized surveys of over 1 million Indian households and district-level bank branch location pre-determined by government policy, we find instead that financial access shifts workers from informal entrepreneurship into formal...

Experimental evidence on a range of interventions in developing countries is accumulating rapidly. Is it possible to extrapolate from an experimental evidence base to other locations of policy interest (from “reference” to “target” sites)? And which factors determine the accuracy of such...

Experimental evidence on a range of interventions in developing countries is accumulating rapidly. Is it possible to extrapolate from an experimental evidence base to other locations of policy interest (from “reference” to “target” sites)? And which factors determine the accuracy of such...

Administrative data reveal that Romanian households could choose schools with 1 s.d. worth of additional value added. Why do households leave value added “on the table”? We study two possibilities: households may lack information about value added, or they may have preferences for other...

Developing country labor practices and the working conditions that result from them are both generally poor and increasingly drawing attention from governments, corporations, and the popular media. This review provides an introduction to some of the leading academic literature and ideas that are...

In an experiment in non-formal schools in Indian slums, an incentive for attending a target number of school days increased average attendance when the incentive was in place, but had heterogeneous effects after it was removed. Among students with high baseline attendance, the post-incentive...