This paper offers for the first time a global picture of gender discrimination by the law as it affects women's economic opportunity and charts the evolution of legal inequalities over five decades. Using the World Bank's newly extended Women, Business and the Law database, the paper documents...

Students around the world are going to school but are not learning-an emerging gap in human capital formation. To understand this gap, this paper introduces a new data set measuring learning in 164 countries and territories. The data cover 98 percent of the world's population from 2000 to 2017....

Data on global trade as well as capital and labor flows indicate a slowdown, but not reversal, of globalization post the 2008-09 financial crisis. Yet profound changes in the policy environment and public sentiment in the largest economies over the past five years suggest the beginning of a new...

This paper studies the impact of PROBEMS, a scholarship program in Mexico aimed at improving graduation rates and test scores among upper secondary school students from poor backgrounds. The identification strategy is the random allocation into the program, which took place in 2009. The strategy...

This paper analyzes earnings inequality and earnings dynamics in Sweden over 1985-2016. The deep recession in the early 1990s marks a historic turning point with a massive increase in earnings inequality and earnings volatility, and the impact of the recession and the recovery from it lasted for...

A common explanation for the poor performance of entrepreneurs in developing economies is their inability to obtain credit to expand their scale of operation. This paper assesses the aggregate impacts of the Cartão BNDES, a credit line targeted at small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Brazil,...

The relationship between firms and inequality has been a focus of recent attention globally. This chapter summarizes basic facts about this relationship for Latin America. Unlike advanced economies where superstar firm growth has prompted concerns over disproportionate income growth at the top,...

The returns to schooling or the skill premium is a key parameter in various literatures, including globalization and inequality and international migration. This paper explores the skill premium and its link to exports in Latin America, thus linking the skill premium to the emerging literature...

The returns to schooling and the skill premium are key parameters in various fields and policy debates, including the literatures on globalization and inequality, international migration, and technological change. This paper explores the skill premium and its correlation with exports in Latin...

This paper empirically studies the dynamics of labor market adjustment following the Brazilian trade reform of the 1990s. The paper uses variation in industry-specific tariff cuts interacted with initial regional industry mix to measure trade-induced local labor demand shocks and examines...