Using a primary school curricular standard basic mathematics competence test, this paper documents the low level of student achievement amongst 10-18 year old rural children in Bangladesh and tests the extent to which years spent in school increases learning. Our sample includes children...

This paper investigates how gender disparities affect the time to repay group micro-finance loans using survival analysis and hazard decomposition techniques. We also control for the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the time needed by micro-finance loan borrowers to repay. We use a large...

Female “empowerment” has increasingly become a policy goal, both as an end to itself and as a means to achieving other development goals. Microfinance in particular has often been argued, but not without controversy, to be a tool for empowering women. Here, using a randomized controlled...

We report on a randomized field experiment using price incentives to address both economic and gender inequality in land tenure formalization. During the 1990s and 2000s, nearly two dozen African countries proposed de jure land reforms extending access to formal, freehold land tenure to millions...

Incumbent politicians in African countries have been cementing their positions in recent elections. That was the case of the Mozambican election of 2009, where the ruling party secured 75 percent of the vote, amid low participation and clear challenges of political accountability. We conducted a...

The labour market in Romania is under the pressure of divergent factors, at the intersection of the labour demand and supply determinants. This paper is focusing on quantitative and qualitative analysis of the labour market in Romania, trying to identify its imbalances and to find ways for their...

In recent years, the labour market in Romania became more and more tense, with growing labour shortages affecting the development of many important sectors. This paper is focusing on the labour market imbalances, specifying the main landmarks of labour shortages and highlighting their conditions...

This paper attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of Bolivia’s labor market institutions, particularly the Plan Nacional de Empleo de Emergencia (PLANE). It is found that unemployment as conventionally defined may not be the most important problem in Bolivia’s labor market, as the...

Background: The U.S. Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program provides workers who have lost their jobs due to increased trade with income support and training, job search, and relocation benefits. This paper uses the most recent data collected by the Department of Labor on TAA beneficiaries to...

We address the role that deep, structural factors may have as determinants of Mexico's economic growth. We argue that Mexico's poor growth performance appears to be associated not only with shorter-run events such as the lost decade of the eighties, but also with supply-side features of the...