Governments around the world have introduced reforms to attempt to make it easier for informal firms to formalize. However, most informal firms have not gone on to become formal, especially when tax registration is involved. A randomized experiment based around the introduction of the...

In April 2014, the Government of Benin launched the entreprenant status, a simplified and free legal regime offered to small informal businesses to enter the formal economy. This paper presents the short-term results of a randomized impact evaluation testing three different versions of the...

Few representative surveys of households of migrants exist, limiting the analysis of the effects of international migration on sending families. This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to compare the performance of three alternative survey methods in collecting data from...

The paper uses individual level census and household survey data to present a rich profile of the young developing migrants around the world. Youth are found to comprise a large share of all migrants, particularly in migration to other developing countries, with the probability of migration...

The degree of mobility in incomes is often seen as an important measure of the equality of opportunity in a society and of the flexibility and freedom of its labor market. But estimation of mobility using panel data is biased by the presence of measurement error and non-random attrition from the...

Theories of poverty traps stand in sharp contrast to the view that anybody can make it through hard work and thrift. However, empirical detection of poverty traps is complicated by the lack of long panels, measurement error, and attrition. This paper shows how dynamic pseudo-panel methods can...

Increased attention to the development potential of international migration has led to calls for greater global cooperation and for industrial countries to consider temporary worker programs and other options for increasing the number of immigrants admitted. But less attention has been devoted...

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in border closures in many countries and a sharp reduction in overall international mobility. However, this disruption of legal pathways to migration has raised concerns that potential migrants may turn to irregular migration routes as a substitute. This paper...

Why do more small firms in developing countries not use the market for professional business services like accounting, marketing, and human resource specialists? Two key reasons may be that firms lack information about the availability of these services, and that they struggle to distinguish the...

A randomized experiment among poor entrepreneurs tested the impact of exogenously inducing higher financial aspirations. In theory, raising aspirations could have positive effects by inducing higher effort, but could also reduce effort if unmet aspirations lead to frustration. Treatment resulted...