We analyse the effect of parental risk preferences and a novel measure of maternal bargaining power over educational expenses - elicited via lab-in-the-field experiments in rural Côte d'Ivoire – on the educational progression of boys and girls. Data from 135 couples and their children show...

This paper proposes a novel experimental measure of women's relative bargaining power, relates this measure to expenditures on various household public goods, and studies its determinants. A key question we address in the process is whether higher bargaining power for women translates into...

This paper unpacks the role of the domestic content of imports as a novel source of policy interdependence along the global supply chain. We show how a rise in local contents embodied in imports can skew national trade policy preferences, and pull upstream and downstream countries in asymmetric...

We develop and estimate a theory-consistent gravity model for interregional migration flows in the presence of unemployment. Micro-founded in a setting where search friction regulates labor market transitions, we derive a migration gravity equation for bilateral mobility that embodies a...

In many countries, non-compliance with minimum wage legislation is widespread, and authorities may be seen as having turned a blind eye to a legislation that they have themselves passed. But if enforcement is imperfect, how effective can a minimum wage be? And if non-compliance is widespread,...

Both raw intuition and past experience suggest that the success of an employment guarantee scheme (EGS) in safeguarding the welfare of the poor depends both on the wage it promises, and the ease with which any worker can gain access. An EGS is thus at once a wage guarantee and a rationing...

Ethnic conflicts and their links to international human trafficking have recently received a surge in international attention. It appears that ethnic conflicts exacerbate the internal displacement of individuals from networks of family and community, and their access to economic and social...

Within a general equilibrium framework of a developing economy with a foreign owned factor of production, this paper questions whether the informal-formal sector relationship is procyclical/ complementary - expansion or contraction in one necessarily implies an expansion or contraction in the...

Labor market subcontracting is a global phenomenon. This paper presents a theory of wage fairness in a subcontracted labor market, where workers confront multi-party employment relationships and deep wage inequities between regular and subcontractor-mediated hires. We show that subcontracting...

Using data from the Rural Ethiopian Household Survey, which contains a behavioral module, we explore the link between adult risk and time preferences and the incidence and the intensity of child labor. While as expected child labor at both the extensive and the intensive margin is a result of...