Working with a private bank in Ghana, this study examines the impacts of a commitment savings product designed to help clients taking repeated overdrafts break their debt cycles. Overall, the product significantly increased savings with the bank without increasing overdrafts. However, after...

This paper examines how easily observable interviewer characteristics, such as gender and physical attractiveness, and more difficult to observe characteristics, such as attitudes and beliefs, affect adolescent girls' disclosure of sexual behavior during a baseline survey for an adolescent girls...

Gender disparities in small and medium-size enterprise lending exist around the world and impede the growth of millions of women-led firms. This paper examines a potential driver of these disparities: gender-biased loan officers. Officer bias is measured through a novel loan application...

This paper analyzes changes in agricultural productivity gender gaps in Cote d'Ivoire between 2008 and 2016 using decomposition methods. The analysis finds that the unconditional gender gap between male- and female-headed households has decreased by 14 percent over the past decade. The...

This paper documents novel evidence of positive assortative matching in African marriage markets along cognitive and socio-emotional skills, time and risk preferences, and education, using data from rural Mozambique, Cote d'Ivoire, and Malawi

This paper examines women's power relative to that of their husbands in 23 Sub-Saharan African countries to determine how it affects women's health, reproductive outcomes, children's health, and children's education. The analysis uses a novel measure of women's empowerment that is closely linked...

This paper investigates whether the relative self-esteem level of spouses can lead to within- household competition for inputs and affect economic gender inequality in the home. Using data on smallholder farmer couples in Cote d'Ivoire, the paper examines the relationship between spouses'...