Measuring job quality across countries has been challenging and has relied typically on a single indicator, such as formality or wages. To contribute to this critical policy issue, this paper presents a first global estimate of job quality departing from microdata. It assembles a harmonized...

Understanding the selection of workers into informality is a policy priority to design programs to increase formalization across Sub-Saharan Africa, where nine out of ten workers are informal. This paper estimates a model of self-selection with entry barriers into the formal sector to identify...

The 2001/02 Argentine crisis had a profound impact on Uruguay's economy. Uruguay's gross domestic product shrank by 17.5 percent and the proportion of people living below the poverty line doubled in just two years. It took almost 10 years for the poverty rate to recover to its pre-crisis level....

Poor health at birth has negative long-run effects on individual well-being and is also detrimental for intergenerational mobility. This paper examines whether health outcomes at birth are affected by in utero increased exposure to rainfall and temperature shocks in Colombia, one of the...

Estimating ex-ante distributional impacts of road infrastructure is increasingly important to better understand the poverty effects of these investments. This note presents such analysis for the ongoing 4th generation (4G) road concessions program in Colombia, which involves the concession of 40...

Evidence on the effect of exports on welfare at the local level is scarce. Using a unique data set of international trade and poverty maps for almost 2,000 Mexican municipalities between 2004 and 2014, the study presented in this paper provides new evidence on the impact of a significant rise in...

Growth is an important channel for poverty reduction. Policies to make growth more "inclusive" have permeated the development debate and "pro-poor growth" has been the subject of a wide range of papers in the literature, including issues related to measurement, modeling, and policy. However, the...

The effects of urban transport policies on household welfare are a broadly understudied topic in developing countries. This paper analyzes the distributional effects of a newly established bus rapid transit system in Barranquilla, Colombia. The paper uses pooled cross-sectional household survey...