In communities highly dependent on rain fed agriculture for their livelihoods, the common occurrence of climatic shocks such as droughts can lower the opportunity cost of having children, and raise fertility. Using longitudinal household data from Madagascar, we estimate the causal effect of...

We examine the impact of rainfall variability and cyclones on schooling and work among a cohort of teens and young adults in Madagascar. We estimate a bivariate probit model using a panel survey conducted in 2004 and 2011 in this poor island nation, which is frequently affected by extreme...

Recent advances in the collective model literature suggest ways to estimate the complete allocation of resources within households, using assignable goods and assuming adult preference similarity across demographic groups (or across spouses). While it makes welfare analysis at the individual...

Most youth in developing countries leave school with only a general academic education level, slowing down their transition to the labor market. We analyze whether work experience during school can help youth transition more easily to a first job in Benin. We used data from the 2014...

This paper combines pre-pandemic face-to-face survey data with follow up phone surveys collected in April-May 2020 to quantify the overall and differential impacts of COVID-19 on household food security, labor market participation and local food prices in Nigeria. We exploit spatial variation in...

Based on the 2013 Serbian Survey of Income and Living Conditions (SILC) and on the Serbian version of the EUROMOD platform, we evaluate the poverty and distributive effects on children of various reform (benefit and employment) strategies concerning the two major social benefit programs in...

CGE models are often combined with microsimulation (MS) models to perform distributive impact analysis for fiscal or structural policies, or external shocks. This paper describes a user-friendly Stata-based toolkit to perform microsimulations combined with CGE models in a top-down fashion. The...

The abundance of small enterprises in developing countries has led to debates regarding the role that of entrepreneurial skill in business performance. Analyses of the skills and characteristics important for success can inform entrepreneurship training programs or educational curricula designed...

Ample empirical evidence has shown that access to childcare for preschool children increases mothers’ labor-force participation and employment. By estimating the causal effect of a school schedule reform in Chile, we investigated whether increased childcare for primary school children improved...