This paper compiles project-level data from the World Bank's lending history to describe patterns and the composition of its portfolio. The paper focuses particularly on the effect of countries' transition from International Development Association to International Bank for Reconstruction and...

Women's property ownership matters for their well-being and agency; it can also advance economic prosperity and promote the human development of future generations. Yet, until recently, lack of data has constrained researchers from gaining a comprehensive overview of gender differences in...

This paper constructs and estimates a household-level search model to analyze Roma spouses' utility maximization for leisure, home production, and work. The paper aims to explain labor market gender gaps in a marginalized Roma population with low labor market participation rates (males 53...

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic model of individuals' and couples' labor supply, savings, and retirement decisions to analyze how the design of a privatized pension system affects gender pension gaps. Chile has one of the longest running nationwide private retirements accounts...

In patriarchal societies, sticky norms affect married women's social circles, their autonomy, and the outcomes of intra-household bargaining. This paper uses primary data on women's social networks in Uttarakhand, India; the modal woman has only three friends, and over 80 percent do not have any...

This paper reviews the evidence on the importance of human capital for macro-economic development. Through the lens of a simple aggregate production function, human capital might increase output per capita by directly entering in the production process, incentivising the accumulation of...

This paper documents inequality in health and education outcomes by constructing an index of human capital disaggregated by quintiles of socioeconomic status (SES) for a sample 51 mostly low- and middle-income countries. The index measures the expected future human capital of children born...

This paper studies economic growth in Malaysia, with the purpose of assessing the potential to attain the status and characteristics of a high-income country. Future economic growth is simulated under a business-as-usual baseline, where the growth drivers follow their historical or recent...

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are a popular type of social welfare program that make payments to households conditional on human capital investments in children. Compared to unconditional cash transfers (UCTs), CCTs may exclude some low-income households as access is tied to normal...

Improving access to quality education has been the backbone of several development strategies around the world and considerable public resources have been dedicated to achieving this goal. However, one could wonder whether increasing public education expenditure would drive better access to...