We study how international migration changes the private transfers made between households in the migrant sending communities of developing countries. A priori, it is indeterminate whether migration and remittances strengthen or weaken the degree of private transfers in these communities. From a...

This paper summarizes the micro‐level survey evidence from Central Asia generated and analyzed between 1991 and 2012. We provide an exhaustive overview over all accessible individual and household‐level surveys undertaken in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan ‐...

Estimating the effect of 'ethnic capital' on human capital investment decisions is complicated by the endogeneity of location choice of immigrants and the reflection problem. We exploit a rare immigrant settlement policy in Germany to identify the causal impact of parental peer-heterogeneity on...

In this paper we theoretically and empirically examine how the interaction between the formal court system and the informal loan network affects a household's decision to start a business. We find that when the formal court system is weak, expansion of informal credit network leads to the...

This paper exploits an exogenous shift in the trade policy in India to study the impact of industrialization on son preference. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that households are more likely to have a male child in regions with higher trade openness relative to regions with...

We construct a new, direct measure of female autonomy in household decision-making by creating an index from the principal components of a variety of household variables on which mother of a child takes decision. We then examine its impacts on her child’s secondary education in Mexico and find...