India's TVET system, by international standards, is at a very rudimentary level of development. TVET was a relatively neglected subject in India's educational planning, at least until the beginning of 2007. However, this changed with the 11th Plan (2007012). One dimension of this change was the...

To study the causal impact of oil royalties on human capital, we exploit quasi-experimental variation arising from a law in Ecuador that transfers resources to municipalities regardless of their oil-producing status. We find that royalties increase the likelihood of students completing primary...

We construct a multi-layer model of skills, occupations, and sectors. Technological progress among middle-skill occupations raises the employment shares and relative wages of lower- and higher-skill occupations (horizontal polarization), and those of managers over workers (vertical...

Developing and emerging economies face enormous challenges to reconcile economic development and job creation with decarbonization. An essential aspect of such "early-stage" decoupling of growth and carbon emissions is to develop a skill base that favours the diffusion of green productions and...

In-service teacher training aims to improve the supply of public education. A randomized experiment was conducted in Mexico to test whether teacher training could increase teacher efficiency in public secondary schools. After seven and a half months of exposure to a trained teacher, students...

Indian policymakers - like most of their counterparts across the developing and developed world - have been concerned with the employability of their working-age populations in particular, for obvious economic and sociopolitical reasons. However, such concern has been largely missing as far as...

The high outward mobility that has characterised the countries in the Western Balkan (WB) region over the past three decades is often seen as tightly linked to severe labour market imbalances and persistently low utilisation of human capital over time. To shed light on these issues, we estimate...

The emergence of slums is a common feature in a country's path towards urbanization, structural transformation and development. Based on salient micro and macro evidence of Brazilian labor, housing and education markets, we construct a simple model to examine the conditions for slums to emerge....

In 1997, the Mexican government designed the conditional cash transfer program Progresa, which became the worldwide model of a new approach to social programs, simultaneously targeting human capital accumulation and poverty reduction. A large literature has documented the short and medium-term...

This paper examines how rural households cope with climate change related rainfall shocks by re-allocating children's time between domestic activities and school attendance. Households affected by an unanticipated rainfall shock face an inter-temporal trade-off between current household income...