Despite a sizeable literature on the labour market effects of maternity leave regulations on women in developed countries, how these policies affect women's work in developing countries with a large informal sector remains poorly understood. This study examines how extending the maternity leave...

Raising women's political participation leads to faster maternal mortality decline. We estimate that the introduction of quotas for women in parliament results in a 9-12 per cent decline in maternal mortality. In terms of mechanisms, it also leads to an 8-11 per cent increase in skilled birth...

This paper makes the case that current social contracts are often inadequate, irrelevant, or unjust for informal workers. It outlines three possible future scenarios: the bad old contract, an even worse contract, and a better new contract. Under the bad old contract, informal workers lacked...

Building on a World Bank regional study in Africa aiming at measuring social contracts concepts and within the framework of reflecting on future donor interventions, this paper applies social contracts measurement and complements with qualitative assessments in Somalia. This paper uses the...

We investigate within the context of Viet Nam how circumstances at age 15 or 16 relate to completion of upper secondary education four years later. We exploit the longitudinal elements of the Viet Nam Access to Resources Household Survey to identify household and commune characteristics and...

We use a recent first-hand linked employer-employee survey covering the formal sector of Bangladesh to explain gender wage gaps by the inclusion of measures of cognitive attainment and personality traits. Our results show that cognitive skills have greater explanatory power than personality...

We design an experiment to examine whether egalitarian preferences, and in particular, behindness aversion as well as preference for favourable inequality affect competitive choices differently among males and females. We find that selection into competitive environments is: (a) negatively...

This paper analyses the political economy of women's-empowerment-related policymaking in India through a re-examination of the context of both the genesis and closure of a major programme, Mahila Samakhya. Mahila Samakhya, which embodied feminist philosophy and pedagogy, started in 1987 with the...

Cameroon is an example of a developing country where the transition from agriculture to services has defied standard patterns seen in developed countries. While prior research has explored this shift's impact on economic growth, its effects on women's representation in the labour market have...

We evaluate the effectiveness of a post-conflict development programme on maternal health-care utilization in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. Our work varies from conventional impact evaluation studies because of the inclusion of two post-conflict psychosocial risks: the household's...