There is an inherent tension between implementing organizations - which have specific objectives and narrow missions and mandates - and executive organizations - which provide resources to multiple implementing organizations. Ministries of finance/planning/budgeting allocate across ministries...

This paper investigates the net impact of birth control policy in China on educational attainment of the partially excluded ethnic minorities. Exploring county-level variation in the value of fines levied for unsanctioned births, we show that more stringent enforcement of the birth control...

This paper delves into the effect of female bargaining power on child education and labor outcomes in Nigeria. Female bargaining power is proxied by female say on labor income, rather than by female income per se. This is motivated by the fact female labor force participation might be low in...

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,...

In very poor countries, inequality often means that a small part of the population maintains living standards far above the rest. This is also true for educational inequality in Mozambique: only a small segment of the population has access to higher levels of education (there are 30 times as...

Industrial policies have played an important role in successful development. Through these policies, governments intervene in the market's sectoral allocation of resources and choice of technologies. Earlier industrial policies had a narrow remit and made use of a limited number of instruments....

The increasing quantity of literature investigating the impact of trade openness on firm efficiency has not yet provided a definite prediction of the direction of causality. This paper investigates how the relationship between exporting and productivity impacts on manufacturing sectors in...

In this study, we investigate the relationship between exporting and firm performance using a longer panel dataset of Ethiopian manufacturing firms for the period 1996 - 2009. We test two hypotheses regarding exporting: selection into exporting versus learning by exporting. According to the...

Many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry - that is, governments and organizations pretend to reform by changing what policies or organizations look like rather than what they actually do. The...

This paper analyses the pathways of technology diffusion through social networks, following the experimental introduction of new technologies in Guinea-Bissau. In the context of an agricultural extension project, we document both the direct effects of this intervention and subsequent diffusion...