Do the stringent formal sector borrowing requirements common in many developing countries restrict credit access, technology adoption, and welfare? When a Kenyan dairy's savings and credit cooperative randomly offered some farmers the opportunity to replace loans with high down payments and...

We followed field workers administering a household survey over a 12-week period and examined how their reciprocal behavior towards the employer responded to a sequence of exogenous wage increases and wage cuts. To disentangle the effects of reciprocal behavior from other explicit incentives...

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),...

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...

Contrary to the predictions of Economic Theory, Southern Europe's rapid fertility decline has resulted in a positive cross-country correlation between female labor force participation and fertility. We develop a model with heterogeneity in attitudes towards women's home time and a social...

Bulgaria is undergoing a profound socio-economic transformation brought about by extraordinary demographic change. Between 1950 and 1990, Bulgaria’s population grew from 7.3 million to 8.8 million and then declined to 7.5 million by 2010. Low birth rates and high mortality rates combined with...

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,...