When parents migrate from home to another place and leave their children behind, it can have a large influence on their children. This study explores the relationship between parental migration and the learning outcomes of left-behind children aged 7-14 in Pacific Island economies, particularly...

Indonesia's urban centers recently underwent an explosion of supermarkets. With cheaper, higher quality commodities and better services, supermarkets have the potential to drive traders in traditional markets out of business. In this paper, we evaluate whether this is indeed the case. We find...

This paper examines the relationship between the type of senior high school attended by Indonesian youth and their subsequent labor market outcomes. This topic is very timely, given the government’s recent decision to dramatically expand vocational enrollment. The analysis controls for an...

Measuring unemployment in developing countries is not straightforward due to the presence of a large number of discouraged workers. Including them into the labor force is sometimes appropriate in order to reflect the true state of unemployment. However, the decision must be based on careful...

This paper investigates how failing to consider missing funds in public resource delivery can lead to misleading conclusions on the nature and correlates of targeting performance. Combining administrative data on disbursement and household survey data on receipt under Indonesia's anti-poverty...

This paper takes advantage of a regional corruption measure to assess the impact of corruption on the effectiveness of public spending in the education sector in Indonesia, one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Two sets of outcomes are considered: school enrolment rates and school...

This paper examines the relationship between the type of senior high school attended by Indonesian youth and their subsequent labor market outcomes. This topic is timely in light of a recent policy shift that aims to dramatically expand vocational education. The analysis controls for an...

Different economic characteristics between developing and developed countries may require worker with different skills, resulting in different returns to the same ability. Moreover, it is also possible that different countries require different skills depending on their economic fundamentals....

This paper measures the evolution of the gender differences in numeracy among school age children using a longitudinal dataset from Indonesia. A unique feature of the dataset is that it uses an identical test for two survey rounds, which implies that any changes in the gender gap are caused by...