This paper examines the effect of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. The adult literacy programs in Ghana are of special interest because they are more comprehensive than standard literacy programs and incorporate many additional topics. We use community...

Using data on more than 56,000 enterprises in 90 countries, this study finds that objective conditions in the business environment vary substantially across firms of different sizes and that there are important nonlinearities in their impact on employment growth. The study focuses on four areas:...

This article explores the executive compensation structure in China. Using unbalanced panel data on 17,178 executives in 1,386 publicly listed firms in China during 1999–2006, we find that (1) both executive pay and the pay gap between executive ranks increased over time; (2) pay distribution...

This study jointly examines the gender earnings gap and employment rate in urban China using a longitudinal data set that covers the period of 1989–2004. Consistent with previous studies, we find that gender earnings gap increased by 5 percentage points between 1989 and 1997. Since then, its...

The governments of many developing economies have actively promoted the expansion of banks in rural areas, believing that such investments are necessary to reduce poverty and existing levels of wealth inequality. There is little evidence on whether such “social banking” programs succeed in...

This paper uses micro data from the 1980, 1991, and 2000 population censuses to investigate the role of changes in the industry mix in accounting for the differential trends in the incidence of child work (ages 10–15) across Brazilian states. We find that exogenous compositional changes...

We combine Rwandan household survey data with event data on the timing and location of localized crop failure and armed conflict to examine the impact of these distinct shocks on children’s health status. The identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in the shocks’ geographic...

In areas of Africa hard hit by HIV/AIDS, there are growing concerns that many women lose access to land after the death of their husbands. However, there remains a dearth of quantitative evidence on the proportion of widows who lose access to their deceased husband’s land, whether they lose...