Middle-income countries (MICs) are now home to most of the world’s extreme poor — the billion people living on less than $1.25 a day and a further billion people living on between $1.25 and $2. At the same time, many MICs are also home to a drastically expanding emerging middle or nonpolar...

This paper updates the distribution of global poverty data and makes projections up to 2020. The paper asks the following question: Do the world’s extreme poor live in poor countries? It is argued that many of the world’s extreme poor already live in countries where the total cost of ending...

Economists have measured the effects of immigration on native employment primarily with exogenous shifts in the foreign labor supply curve. This paper suggests an alternative, occupation-specific approach: directly describe, for one job, the native labor supply curve. The paper applies this...

Africa's industrial progress has been disappointing. With the exception of South African auto components and garments, both of which have benefited from special incentives, Africa exports almost no manufactured goods that are not based on the processing of raw materials. Despite considerable...

Labor markets are increasingly global. Overseas work can enrich households but also split them geographically, with ambiguous net effects on decisions about work, investment, and education. These net effects, and their mechanisms, are poorly understood. We study a policy discontinuity in the...

The recent wave of randomized trials in development economics has provoked criticisms regarding external validity. We investigate two concerns — heterogeneity across beneficiaries and implementers — in a randomized trial of contract teachers in Kenyan schools. The intervention, previously...

In recent years, and especially in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, a number of emerging-market economies have been reforming their regulatory frameworks to adopt recommendations of the macroprudential approach. This paper discusses the potential usefulness of implementing this...

Together with a handful of countries at the global level, a number of economies in the Andean region stand out by their innovative and rapid advances in the design and implementation of macroprudential financial regulations, that is, regulations that take into account financial risks generated...

Investors diversify their portfolios to boost returns and manage risk. However, the benefits of diversifying across geographic regions are reduced if markets are highly correlated. This paper examines trends over the past two decades and finds, as expected from global market integration, that...

We show how financial and managerial constraints impede experimentation and thus limit learning about the profitability of investments. Imperfect information about one's own type, but willingness to experiment to learn one's type, leads to short-run negative expected returns to investments, with...