This paper uses recently published top 1% income share series in studying the inequality-development association. The top income shares data are of high quality and cover about a century for some countries and thus provide an interesting opportunity to study slow development processes. The...

This paper provides a preliminary assessment of COVID-19's impact on global poverty in the light of the IMF's April 2020 growth forecasts. The analysis shows that the pandemic will have dramatic consequences, eroding many of the gains recorded over the last decade in terms of poverty reduction....

In this study, we assess formal education as a causal determinant of women's malaria preventive behaviour, as well as children's risk of malaria infection. For identification, we rely on exogenous variation in educational attainment generated by educational reforms during the 1970s. We use data...

This paper estimates a private school learning premium in Tanzania by implementing a flexible value-added model with unique administrative data on exam scores. The dataset covers 635,000 secondary school students with information on both their primary and lower secondary school exam records,...

This paper examines Chile Solidario, a social protection programme that provides poor households in Chile with preferential access to a conditional cash transfer programme designed to facilitate investments in children's health and education. We assess the programme's longer-term impact on...

How have economic development, employment, and labour markets in Asian countries interacted since the publication of Myrdal's Asian Drama? Myrdal rejected, the western approach to and definition of employment and emphasized the role of "informal" employment, but he underestimated the effects of...

This paper studies the general equilibrium impact of civil war in Sierra Leone. I first use an instrumental variable (IV) strategy and geographic conflict variation to estimate reduced-form effects. I show that civil war leads to affected areas having a higher share of workers in agriculture,...

We use data on inter-generational gains in educational attainment by some 500,000 individuals in 200 West Bengal villages to explore gender-differentiated impacts of land reform on human capital accumulation at the individual level. While there are significant gains (of about 0.3 years for...

It is widely accepted that the distribution of power between ethnic groups within a country plays a key role in major social, political, and economic outcomes. Researchers working on the topic have various measures of ethnic dominance and exclusion, and other closely related aspects such as...

Almost all major development institutions today say that promoting good governance is an important part of their agendas. Despite this consensus, 'good governance' is an extremely elusive objective: it means different things to different organizations and to different actors within these...