In recent years Poland has received substantial inflows of foreign direct investment. This paper combines detailed labour market data with industry data from the Polish manufacturing sector to examine the effects of foreign direct investment inflows on wages and wage growth. The empirical...

The diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their potential as a development tool have generated a wide array of views. The variety of views suggests that the role and impact of these technologies are still obscure and that the debate regarding them suffers from a lack...

Dominant development policy approaches recommend women’s employment on the grounds that it facilitates their empowerment, which in turn is believed to be instrumental in enhancing women’s well-being. However, empirical work on the relationship between women’s employment status and their...

A well-known demographic feature in several East and South Asian countries is the continuing decline in the proportion of girls to boys. In India, till recently, the skewed sex ratio was treated as a Northern and Western Indian phenomenon. However, analysis of the 2001 Census shows that some of...

The global microfinance movement is driven by the claim that once poor micro-entrepreneurs are provided access to capital, they will be able to generate high returns. The existing evidence on returns to capital is mixed and too limited to substantiate this claim. This paper reports on a field...

Rural households in Ethiopia are exposed to a variety of covariate and idiosyncratic risks. In 2005, the Ethiopian government introduced the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) and in 2011 launched the Community Based Health Insurance Scheme (CBHI). This paper analyses the interaction between...

This paper examines the labor market implications of a mandatory social insurance scheme introduced in Ethiopia in 2011 for private sector employees in the formal sector. We use firm-level panel data and exploit differences in pre-reform pension plans across firms to identify the effects of the...

In a number of countries, youth unemployment is a pressing economic and political concern. In India, 54 percent of the country's population of 1.21 billion is below the age of 25 and faces a high rate of (disguised) unemployment. To augment youth employment, the Government of India has launched...