This paper estimates the impacts of secondary school on human capital, occupational choice, and fertility for young adults in Kenya. The probability of admission to government secondary school rises sharply at a score close to the national mean on a standardized 8th grade examination, permitting...

This paper examines wage dynamics and turnover using tracking data of adolescents from the Philippines. The analysis uses individual test scores in grade 6 to proxy abilities. The empirical results show that (i) returns to labor market experience are large, nearly a half of the conventional...

This paper evaluates the impact of strengthening legal rights on the types of economic opportunities that are pursued. Ethiopia changed its family law, requiring both spouses' consent in the administration of marital property, removing the ability of a spouse to deny permission for the other to...

Using an extraordinarily rich panel dataset from Ghana, this paper explores the nature of self-employment and informality in developing countries through the analysis of self-reported happiness with work and life. Subjective job satisfaction measures allow assessment of the relative desirability...

This study investigates the choice of occupational focus versus diversification between household members in rural Bangladesh as an autonomous and proactive adaptation strategy against ex ante local rainfall variability risks. The analysis combines nationally representative household level...

Differences in earnings between male and female workers persist in developed and developing countries despite a narrowing of gender gaps in educational attainment over the past half-century. This paper examines the gender wage gap in Vietnam and shows that a nontrivial part of the gap is...

This study presents results from a randomized evaluation of two labor market interventions targeted to young women aged 18 to 19 years in three of Nairobi's poorest neighborhoods. One treatment offered participants a bundled intervention designed to simultaneously relieve credit and human...

This paper investigates the relationship between location, agglomeration, access to credit, informality, and productivity across cities and industries in Cameroon. Emphasizing the link between micro-foundations and the data, the paper develops and estimates a structural model of occupational...

Who are the civil servants that serve poor people in the developing world? This paper uses direct surveys of civil servants -- the professional body of administrators who manage government policy -- and their organizations from Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines,...

A burgeoning area of social science research examines how state capabilities and bureaucratic effectiveness shape economic development. This paper studies how the management practices of civil service bureaucrats correlate to the delivery of public projects, using novel data from the Ghanaian...