Does "empowerment" come hand-in-hand with higher economic welfare? In theory, higher income is likely to raise both power and welfare, but heterogeneity in other characteristics and household formation can either strengthen or weaken the relationship. Survey data on Russian adults indicate that...

This paper empirically examines how standards and technical regulations affect export margins in three African countries at the firm level. The approach involves combining detailed customs transaction data at the firm-product level with bilateral information on non-tariff measures within a...

The expansion of marine protected areas (MPAs) is a core focus of global conservation efforts, with the "30x30" initiative to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030 serving as a prominent example of this trend. This paper examines a series of proposed MPA network expansions of various sizes and...

The design of the power market determines how the sector can address complex economic, social, environmental, and engineering challenges to deliver sustainable and reliable electricity at least cost to consumers. This is no simple task, as supply and demand must be balanced every second,...

The three major players in the global economy, the United States, the European Union, and China, have been designing climate mitigation policies that will help reduce their carbon emissions but will also likely reshape developing countries' trade, prices, and access to technology. This paper...

This paper estimates the impact of bilateral labor arrangements on migration between two countries. It uses comprehensive data on bilateral migration and bilateral labor agreements across all country pairs for each decade from 1960 to 2020, and employs an empirical specification with a rich set...

The information and communications technology sector has undergone a dynamic process of globalization and fragmentation in the past few decades, leading to the creation of global value chains. Global value chains are populated by a constellation of specialized actors collectively responsible for...

Do higher food prices help or hinder poverty reduction? Despite much debate, existing research has almost solely relied on simulation models to address this question. In this paper World Bank poverty estimates are used to systematically test the relationship between changes in poverty and...

As global extreme poverty has fallen -- by one measure, from close to 2 billion people in 1990 to about 700 million today -- the world has learned about antipoverty strategies that work. These experiences should inform the final push to end extreme poverty. In the 1960s and 1970s, when close to...

The paths of many migrants include multiple destinations and transit routes, yet this pattern is almost never reflected in empirical analyses. For example, 9 percent of recent immigrants to the United States arrived from a transit country as opposed to the country where they were born. Among...