Intro -- Contents -- 1 Introduction: Banking the World -- I Where Are We Now? -- 2 Half the World Is Unbanked -- II Better Data -- 3 Cause and Effect of Financial Access: Cross-Country Evidence from the FinScope Surveys -- 4 How to Ask Households about Financial Services: Experimental Evidence...

Languages use different systems for classifying nouns. Gender languages assign nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine. We construct a new data set, documenting the presence or absence of grammatical gender in more than 4,000 languages which together account for more than...

Languages use different systems for classifying nouns. Gender languages assign many -- sometimes all -- nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine. Drawing on a broad range of historical and linguistic sources, this paper constructs a measure of the proportion of each...

Many countries remain far from achieving gender equality in the classroom. Using data from 126 countries, we characterize the evolution of gender gaps in low- and middle-income countries between 1960 and 2010. We document five facts. First, women are more educated today than 50 years ago in...

In light of the recent microfinance crisis in South India, government-run institutions in general, and primary agricultural credit cooperatives in particular, may end up playing a larger role in the provision of financial services for the poor. Using survey data collected in 2007 from three...

What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...