During recent years (2004-2008) the proportion of working children in sub-Saharan Africa has increased (Diallo et al. 2010). At the same time, there has been a shift in the patterns of livelihoods, whereby households rely more on sources of income from outside their own farms. When the adult in...

This paper studies the dynamics of fertility in 180 countries in the period 1950-2015 and investigates the determinants of the onset of fertility transitions. We find evidence of convergence in three groups of countries, and distinguish the transitioning countries from those not transitioning....

This research explores the economic causes and consequences of language structures. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that variations in pre-industrial geographical characteristics that were conducive to higher return to agricultural investment, larger gender gap in...

In this paper, we analyse the evolution of the task content of jobs in India between 1983 and 2011. Following standard literature, we calculated five task intensities by combining NSS data with O-Net data at the 3-digit level of occupational classification. We find that, in line with global...

India is seen as a key developmental partner to Nepal with the latter being one of the first receipts of development aid from India. Development aid from India to Nepal has not only been associated with creation of infrastructure in the country but also with human capital development and...

This paper presents a model to explore the welfare effects of the government's choice over two types of public goods provision: domestic regulatory and security spending (adjudication) versus education. Output is a function of physical and social capital, both of which can be heterogeneous...

Informational interventions have been shown to significantly change behavior across a variety of settings. Is that because they lead subjects to merely update beliefs in the right direction? Or, alternatively, is it to a large extent because they increase the salience of the decision they...

Poverty focuses attention on present needs. Does that mean that poor parents respond inefficiently to future returns on investments in their children's human capital - even when they would have the financial means to invest optimally? We study this question in the context of an educational...

Teacher absenteeism and shirking are common problems in developing countries. While monitoring teachers should ameliorate those problems, mobilizing parents to do so often leads to small or even negative effects on learning outcomes. This paper provides causal evidence that this might result...

Previous research has shown that school enrollment in developing countries responds to the changes in demand for low-skilled and high-skilled labor in the market. Using data from Mexico, I show that the negative effects of increases in relative demand for low-skilled labor are not limited to...