While there is a large literature analyzing the distributional impacts of trade reforms across the income or skill distribution, very little is known about the gender effects of trade reforms. This paper seeks to fill this gap and investigates the impact of Brazil's 1987-1994 trade...

Benefit incidence analysis is an extremely popular tool to assess the distribution of benefits from government expenditure in developing countries, particularly in the social sectors. The analysis describes the welfare impact of public spending on groups of people or households, typically along...

We investigate the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade, as two measures of globalization, on female labor force participation in a sample of 80 developing countries over the last decades. Contrary to the mainstream view in the literature, which is mainly based on country-case...

A large literature claims that female labor force participation (FLFP) follows a U-shaped trend over the course of economic development. This feminization U hypothesis is motivated by secular patterns of structural change in combination with education and fertility dynamics. We show that...

This paper investigates the impacts of the economic shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on the employment of different types of workers in developing countries. Employment outcomes are taken from a set of high-frequency phone surveys conducted by the World Bank and National Statistics Offices...

In the past twenty years, India's economy has grown at increasingly faster rates and now belongs to the fastest-growing economies in the world. One would think that in such economic conditions, women are increasingly being pulled into the labour force by attractive pay and employment conditions....

Women consistently work less in the labor market and earn lower wages than men. While economic empowerment of women is an important objective in itself, women's economic activity also matters as a condition for sustained economic growth. The political debate on the labor market impacts of...

We study the surprisingly low level and stagnation of female labor force participation rates in urban India between 1987 and 2009. Despite rising growth, fertility decline, and rising wages and education levels, women's labor force participation stagnated at around 18%. Using five large...

We study the surprisingly low level and stagnation of female labor force participation rates in urban India between 1987 and 2009. Despite rising growth, fertility decline, and rising wages and education levels, women's labor force participation stagnated at around 18%. Using five large...

Using nationally representative survey data of Indian manufacturing enterprises spanning the period 1995-2006, we analyze the link between formal sector subcontracting and informal sector employment. A novelty in our analysis is that this relationship is allowed to differ between modern and...