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...

This paper employs a natural field experiment in the Netherlands to test whether individuals intuitively help strangers with different group identities. We implement time manipulations in an everyday task to stimulate intuitive versus deliberate decision-making and thereafter examine helpfulness...

The impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestically owned firms in developing countries has been widely debated in the literature. It has been argued that FDI provides access to advanced technologies and other intangible assets which may spill over to the host country and allow...

This paper analyzes the creation, destruction and reallocation of jobs in order to understand the micro-dynamics of aggregate employment change in African manufacturing. The nature and magnitude of gross job flows are examined using a unique panel data of Ethiopian manufacturing establishments...

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...

This paper uses a field experiment to study the effect of perceived gender norms on the motherhood penalty in the Indian labor market. We randomly reported motherhood on fictitious CVs sent to service sector job openings. We generated exogenous variation in gender norms by prominently signaling...

Over the last decade Ecuador has experienced a strong increase in financial transfers from migrated workers, amounting to 6.4 percent of GDP and 31.5 percent of total exports of goods and services in 2005. This paper investigates how remittances via transnational networks affect human capital...