Using data from 41,873 individuals across 17 African countries and 13 studies, this paper maps data from various self-reported scales to 10 socio-emotional skills and examine gender differences in these skills and their relationship with education and earnings. Apart from self-control, the...

Large-scale transport infrastructure investment can facilitate structural transformation by changing firm behavior. Although its impact is evident over the long term, an important empirical challenge is potential endogeneity of infrastructure placement. By using the dynamic panel data...

This paper examines the influence of gender inequality on poverty among Syrian refugees in Jordan between 2013 and 2018. Two waves of Home-Visit surveys, collected by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, are analyzed to track the evolution of poverty among Syrian refugees in...

Childcare services enable women who were previously unable to work due to taking care of their children to join the labor market. If some women are more productive in market work, rather than unpaid household work, the availability of childcare can potentially improve the allocation of talent...

Financial development reduces the cost of accessing external financing and thus incentivizes investment in higher-productivity projects that allow firms to expand to the scale needed to operate in the formal economy. It also encourages participants of the informal sector to join the formal...

This paper presents new evidence on the levels and trends of vaccine hesitancy in developing countries based on harmonized high-frequency phone surveys from more than 120,000 respondents in 53 low- and middle-income countries. These countries represent a combined 30 percent of the population of...

This paper analyzes the distributional impact of the tax-benefit system in Bhutan. It makes two main contributions: first, this is the first substantive study of this kind in Bhutan, and second, due to limited information on incomes in the household survey, a consumption-based model is combined...

This paper uses high-frequency nighttime time lights data to estimate the impacts of the Covid-19 crisis on economic activity during the first year of the pandemic for a global sample of 2,800 cities, covering a total population of 2.5 billion people. Activity is found to be negatively affected...

The relationship between paid maternity leave and the share of female workers in registered private firms is analyzed using firm-level survey data for 111 developing and emerging countries. Theoretically, the relationship can be either positive or negative. Higher maternity leave raises the cost...

Opposition to climate policies seems to arise, at least partly, from their effects on inequality. However, so far, the impact of climate policies on inequality has mainly been studied through the lens of income inequality, and their spatial dimension is poorly understood. This paper, using Cape...