The ancient custom of dowry, that is, bride-to-groom marriage payments, remains ubiquitous in many contemporary societies. This paper examines whether dowry impacted household decision making and resource allocation in rural India during 1986-2007. Utilizing variation in firstborn gender and...

This paper studies foreign direct investment spillovers on the gender-related labor market practices of domestic firms, based on a unique firm-to-firm data set of Bangladesh's textiles and garment sectors. The paper looks at the female employment of domestic firms that are directly and...

Exploiting cross-birth cohort and cross-country variation from a pool of 188 household surveys from 111 countries, this paper measures how life expectancy at birth affects lifetime education and earnings. On average, individuals add one year of schooling for every 8.3 years of increased life...

This paper studies economic growth in Malaysia, with the purpose of assessing the potential to attain the status and characteristics of a high-income country. Future economic growth is simulated under a business-as-usual baseline, where the growth drivers follow their historical or recent...

Armenia, Georgia, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Tajikistan have all experienced substantial out-migration of workers and an associated inflow of workers' remittances over the past two decades. These four countries have much higher human capital, as measured by the Human Capital Index, than is typical...