Does microfinance support the empowerment of female borrowers? Results of studies analyzing microfinance and empowerment delivered mixed results. In order to explore whether microfinance influences empowerment, the paper compares women in higher loan cycles of a Pakistani microfinance...

The ‘Want2Work’ programme was designed to help individuals back into work. This article uses propensity score matching to evaluate the success of a policy that cannot otherwise be evaluated using standard parametric techniques. Using a range of estimation methods, sub-samples and types of...

We measure the impact of the Self-Sufficiency Project (a randomized welfare-to-work experiment in Canada; henceforth, SSP) on relative wage progression. SSP provided a generous 3-year earnings supplement to treatment group members who found a full-time job within a year of the start of the...

The relationship between accessibility or the degree of improvement of urban transport and criminality has been underestimated and close to forgotten. This paper aims to reveal the importance of public transport policies in the evolution of crime configuration in a city. The hypothesis that the...

This paper estimates the impact of the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) on household saving across income quartiles in rural China. We use data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey for the 2006 wave and we run an ordinary least squares regression. We control for the endogeneity of...

We take advantage of Taiwan Education Panel Survey data to evaluate the timing of the coaching effect on mathematics learning for junior high-school students. Our main finding suggests that the best strategy for the budget-limited parents is to send their children to cram schools for intensive...

Using 11 years of county-level panel data, fixed effect models are estimated to evaluate the impact of the Safe Motherhood (SM) Program in China. Propensity score matching is used to select comparable factual and counterfactual counties. Out of 2013 counties in China, 283 are selected for the...

During the first few years of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and aided by pro-natal government policies, Iranian fertility was on the rise. In a reversal of its population policy, in 1989, the government launched an ambitious and innovative family planning program aimed at rural families. By...

HASH(0x1009dca88)

Our paper investigates the relative effects of wage subsidies and further vocational training on the subsequent employment prospects of previously unemployed program participants. First, we outline a theoretical approach based on a firm's hiring decision. For the relative effectiveness of both...