This paper demonstrates that the property of Replication Invariance, generally considered to be an innocuous requirement for the extension of fixed-population poverty comparisons to variable-population contexts, is incompatible with other plausible variable- and fixed-population axioms. This...

Social networks can affect demand for human capital investments by relaxing household time or budget constraints or by defining and reinforcing human capital preferences. However, empirically identifying the effect of social networks on human capital investment is usually problematic because...

This paper studies the effects of son-preference by parents and earnings function bias on child labor and schooling in a model in which parents are altruistic. It finds that son-preference leads to gender differential in child labor with female children working more than male children. But it...

This paper studies changes over time in the incidence of labor tying. The existingliterature is successful in explaining the emergence of this institution, but contains thecounterfactual implication that there should be an increasing trend in labor tying. However,previous contributions have so...

Locating substantial parts of the production process in developing and emerging economies, many firms face an increasing demand by stakeholders for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) along their value chains. Contractual incompleteness between firms and their suppliers at different stages of...

With millions of women around the developing world thrown into self-employment but with low productivity, increasing the profitability of their businesses is highly relevant for poverty reduction and gender equity. This study evaluates the impacts of a BDS program serving female...

Persistently high youth unemployment is one of the most pressing problems in South Africa. We prospectively analyze an employer wage subsidy targeted at youth, a policy recently enacted by the South African government to address the issue. Recognizing that a credible estimate of the policy's...

For a set of 14 developing countries I evaluate whether differences in wage gaps between sectors – estimated from individual-level wage data – have meaningful effects on aggregate productivity. Under the most generous assumptions regarding the homogeneity of human capital, my analysis shows...

Intermediaries that assist individuals and firms with the government bureaucracy are common in developing countries. Although such bureaucracy intermediaries are, anecdotally, linked with corruption and welfare losses, few formal analyses exist.

We use a principal–agent framework and data from the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey between 1994 and 2004 to understand biases in the distribution of food aid in Ethiopia. We show that even when aid is systematically misallocated, aid recipients may match official classifications of needy...