This paper addresses whether microcredit participants in Bangladesh are trapped in poverty and debt, as many critics have argued in recent years. Analysis of data from a long panel survey over a 20-year period confirms this is not the case, although numerous participants have been with...

Urban slum residents often have worse health outcomes compared with other urbanites and even their rural counterparts. This suggests that slum residents do not always benefit from the "urban advantage" of enjoying better access to health-promoting services. Limited access to water and sanitation...

The challenges associated with poverty measurement with a cardinal variable have received due attention during the last four decades, but there is a dearth of literature studying how to meaningfully assess poverty with an ordinal variable. This paper first proposes a class of simple, intuitive...

This paper studies how a positive export shock - the sharp increase in garment-sector exports that began at the end of the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) - spread through Bangladesh's labor markets. Although the end of the MFA was arguably exogenous to Bangladesh, the authors instrument export...

Using data from the International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities, this paper on the water sector in pourashavas (municipalities) in Bangladesh provides an analysis of the trends in the water sector development over 2010-16. The main purpose of the paper is to examine the...

Adequate water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in health care facilities plays a critical role in ensuring improved health care utilization and reducing disease burden due to reinfection. WASH in health facilities is now gaining momentum with the new SDG targets that governments have vowed to...

The rank-based measures of intergenerational mobility have become increasingly popular in economics literature. Recent evidence shows that rank-based measures are less affected by measurement error and life-cycle bias compared with other standard measures such as intergenerational regression...

Poor households often rely on transfers from their social networks for consumption smoothing, yet there is limited evidence on how antipoverty programs affect informal transfers. This paper exploits the randomized roll-out of BRAC's ultra-poor graduation program in Bangladesh and panel data...

The relationship between the length of paid maternity leave and the proportion of female workers in the private sector is explored using firm-level survey data for 66 mostly developing countries. The paper finds a large, positive, and statistically significant relationship between the two....

This paper estimates the welfare change arising from the capture of the Republic of Yemen's capital in 2014, using a multi-themed household survey conducted as the capital was captured. Despite the little violence in this setting, the increase in fragility resulted in a large decline in...