India's colonial legacy and linguistic diversity give English an important role in its economy, and this role has expanded due to globalization in recent decades. In this study, we use individual-level data from the 2005 India Human Development Survey to quantify the effects of English-language...

Recent scholarship has uncovered convincing evidence of systematic donor influence in international financial institutions such as the World Bank. Less clear is how donors influence international financial institutions' decisions. Possible avenues are formal and informal: formal influence...

Poor rural women in the developing world spend considerable time collecting water. Do women living in places where more time is needed for water collection tend to participate less in income-earning market-based activities? Do the education outcomes of their children tend to be worse? We use...

After a decade of pronatal policies, in 1989 the Iranian government reversed itself and launched an ambitious program to control population growth. In the subsequent 15 years the average number of births per rural woman dropped from more than seven to the replacement level. We evaluate the...

We organize a field experiment with sesame farmers and brokers in northern Ethiopia to explore whether market experience fosters rational behavior--proxied by fewer Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference (GARP) violations in a simple choice experiment. In the baseline study, farmers and...

The impacts of international emigration and remittances on incomes and poverty in sending areas are increasingly studied with household survey data. But comparing households with and without emigrants is complicated by a triple-selectivity problem: first, households self-select into emigration;...

We argue that women may be disinclined to participate in market work in the rural areas of India because of family status concerns in a culture that stigmatizes market work by married women. We set out a theoretical framework that offers predictions regarding the effects of caste-based status...

In South Asia, Muslims made the transition to modern economic life more slowly than Hindus. In the first half of the twentieth century, they were less likely to use large-scale and perpetual commercial organizations and less likely to serve on corporate boards. Providing evidence, this article...

We estimate the impact of a village-level assistance program run by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania on schooling and literacy. These programs are partly funded by foreign aid from US and Scandinavian donors. Difference-in-difference estimates suggest that the program increased...

Colombia’s rapid and considerable expansion of health insurance coverage in the 1990s provides an opportunity to evaluate in a developing country whether health insurance improves health outcomes. Using administrative data and a regression discontinuity design, we find that babies born from...