An estimated 30–70% of Nairobi’s population lives in informal settlements with very poor access to basic services, yet children are notably absent from the informal settlements. This paper combines qualitative research with three micro data sets and finds that the presence of urban basic...

This report addresses a fundamental question facing policymakers in Uzbekistan: are worker skills hindering employment outcomes? The main finding of the report is that, indeed, worker skills gaps are hindering employment outcomes in Uzbekistan. In fact, employers—particularly formal sector...

This report is about education, skills, and labor market outcomes in the Kyrgyz Republic. The report shows that skills are valued in the Kyrgyz Republic labor market, yet skills gaps persist. Three findings are particularly noteworthy. First, higher skilled youth have better employment outcomes,...

This report addresses a fundamental question facing policy makers in Tajikistan: is the current level of worker skills hindering employment outcomes? Using a unique household survey, the study finds that skills are valued in Tajikistan’s labor market, yet skills gaps persist. Jobs have been...

This paper tests for the endogeneity of one of the main elements separating different models of intrahousehold allocations, namely the household information set. Based on unusually rich data, I find that split migrant couples in the Nairobi slums invest considerable resources into information...

This paper uses a newly collected dataset on Ethiopian physicians to shed light on the allocative efficiency of the physician labor market. We use a lottery mechanism by which medical school graduates are assigned to their first jobs to identify the long-term impact of being posted to a rural...

This article looks at an institutional innovation in which Western investors lend peer-to-peer to poor country enterprises. Using a unique data set from an online lending platform called MYC4, we find that MYC4’s Western lenders grant lower interest rates to pro-poor, socially responsible, and...

One effect of Southern Europe's rapid fertility decline is the emergence of a positive cross-country correlation between women's labor force participation and fertility across developed countries, despite the continuing negative correlation between these factors within countries. This study uses...

This paper looks at an institutional innovation in which Western investors lend peer-to-peer to poor country enterprises. Using a unique dataset from an online lending platform called MyC4, we find that MyC4’s Western lenders grant lower interest rates to pro-poor, socially responsible (SR),...