The channels between gender equality and international trade are complex; there could be both reverse causality and adverse consequences. For example, export-oriented growth in many countries has brought new employment opportunities for women who previously were involved in very low paying or...

Despite the prevalence of agriculture as the main occupation in rural Nepal, evidence suggests that households strive to diversify their sources of income. This paper investigates why this is the case. Using household data from the World Bank and information on rainfall for the various regions...

Acrimonious relations between employers and employees in developing countries have often been cited as impediments to progress. This paper considers various measures of labor disputes, and investigates whether these have detrimental effects on the location choice of new domestic investment...

This paper studies the influence of credit on children's schooling using data from Pakistan. It shows that credit need not increase the likelihood of school attendance for children who work in their household's non-farm enterprise. Moreover, credit obtained for investment purposes may reduce the...

This paper analyzes patterns of foreign direct investment in India. We investigate how labor conflict, credit constraints, and indicators of a state's economic health influence location decisions of foreign firms. We account for the possible endogeneity of labor conflict variables in modeling...

As trade liberalization in India has unleashed a new wave of competitive forces in the economy since 1991, firms have faced growing pressure to cut costs in order to continue production. This study addresses the question of whether the increasing competitive forces from India's trade...

We evaluate the impact of oral polio vaccines on the incidence of disabilities in India, focusing on polio-related disability. Polio was hyperendemic in India even as recently as the early 1990s but the country was declared wild polio virus-free in 2014. Average treatment effects on the treated...

We study the lasting repercussions of the 1918 influenza (‘Spanish Flu’) pandemic on healthmeasures and literacy rates in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the most populous city in South Americatoday, but significantly poorer a century ago. Leveraging temporal and spatial variation indistrict-level...