A randomized experiment in Togo found that personal initiative training for small businesses resulted in large and significant impacts for both men and women after two years. We revisit these entrepreneurs after seven years, and find long-lasting average impacts of personal initiative training...

The Government of Mongolia is committed to reducing the gender gap in life expectancy. Reducing the gender gap in life expectancy is an explicit objective of Mongolia's Cross-Sectoral Strategic Plan for Promoting Gender Equality in Mongolia (2022-31). The first plan to reduce the disparity in...

A large share of jobs in low-income countries are found in self-employment and small firms. Standard business training programs aim to increase the incomes in these firms by teaching a set of business practices. However, such efforts have had relatively limited impacts, with meta-analysis...

High aspirations for their future motivate youth to strive toward them and achieve better outcomes. However, the influence of perceived constraints on the motivational power of is unclear: do high aspirations motivate independently of constraints or only when expected constraints seem workable...

Decision-making is often used as a proxy for agency-the ability to set goals and act on them-although there are several theoretical critiques of this approach. Using unique data from the rural Philippines, this paper empirically tests the extent to which different aspects of decision-making are...

Examining one of the world's largest public business support programs, this paper studies how subsidized credit and partial credit guarantees shape access to finance for micro and small businesses in Indonesia. The analysis uses administrative data on more than 8.4 million borrowers and unique...

A randomized experiment in Togo found that personal initiative training for small businesses resulted in large and significant impacts for both men and women after two years (Campos et al, 2017). This paper revisits these entrepreneurs after seven years, and finds long-lasting average impacts of...

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...

Across a wide variety of regions and contexts, surveys have found high rates of disagreement within couples on matters of household decision making. Using a unique data set from a spousal survey of 421 agricultural households in the Philippines, this paper finds that 50.2 percent of couples...