This paper investigates the effects of taxation on income inequality in an unbalanced panel of 45 countries in sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1980-2018. We use instrumentalvariable two-stage least squares and instrumental-variable quantile regression estimates. We find that taxation widens...

This paper estimates the returns to education and their implications for wage inequality using data from the 2015/16 Namibia Income and Expenditure Survey. The paper employs recentred influence function regression to analyse the impact of education across the wage distribution and uses a...

The paper investigates the differences in private marginal returns to education between wage-employees and the self-employed in Uganda, using the Mincerian framework with pooled regression models. We use a two-wave household panel to estimate homogenous and heterogeneous private returns to...

The growth of firms has been shown to have a meaningful impact on the health of firms and the economy in general. As the body of literature dedicated to understanding high-growth firms has expanded, an interest in the persistence of growth has become even more relevant. This is because...

Using the 2004-05 India Human Development Survey data, we estimate and decompose the earnings of household businesses owned by historically marginalized social groups known as Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SCSTs), and non-SCSTs across the earnings distribution. We find clear differences in...

The World Bank is uniquely positioned to identify and disseminate innovative development practices. Based on his thirty-year experience as a World Bank staff member, the author takes an institutional perspective on the innovation climate at the World Bank focusing on dominant development...

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are now widely used in development economics. However, their use is often resisted by non-governmental development organizations. The objections they raise differ between the three types of activities of such non-governmental organizations (NGOs): capacity...

In this paper, we analyse the patterns and trends of group-based inequalities in Brazil in the past 30 years. Using data from the last four demographic censuses (1980, 1991, 2000, and 2010), we estimate numerous measures to analyse inequalities between different 'ethnic' groups. Our results show...

Social programmes for poverty alleviation involve eligibility rules and transfer rules that often proxy-means tests. We propose to specify the estimator in connection with the poverty alleviation problem. Three distinct stages emerge from the optimization analysis: the identification of the...

This paper investigates the factors influencing participation in non-farm work and the effect of participation on farmers' productivity, using survey data from 300 smallholder farm households in northern Ghana. The study employs an endogenous switching regression model to address selection into...