This paper examine asymmetric information about migrant earnings and its implications for remittance behavior using a sample of Indian households with husbands working overseas in Qatar. On average, wives underreport their husbands’ income and underreporting is more prevalent in households...

Do public sector workers earn a wage premium in Djibouti and are the returns to education different across the sectors? The authors estimate private and public sector wage earnings using 1996 household survey data, while controlling for selectivity using Heckman's two stage approach. They find...

Limited fiscal space limits Djibouti's ability to meet the Millennium Development Goals and improve the living conditions of its population. Djibouti's fiscal structure is unique in that almost 70 percent of government revenue is denominated in foreign currency (import taxes, foreign aid grants,...

What is the effect of trade liberalization on households in developing countries? To what extent do the poor benefit when local markets are made more accommodative to international trade? The author empirically analyzes the distributional impact of trade policies on households in a low-income...

Significant income gains from migrating from poorer to richer countries have motivated unilateral (source-country) policies facilitating labor emigration. However, their effectiveness is unknown. The authors conducted a large-scale randomized experiment in the Philippines testing the impact of...

Financial products and transfer schemes are often designed to help individuals improve welfare by following through on intertemporal plans. This paper implements an artefactual field experiment in Malawi to test the ability of households to manage a cash windfall. This study varies whether 474...

International migration offers individuals and their families the potential to experience immediate and large gains in their incomes, and offers a large number of other positive benefits to the sending communities and countries. However, there are also concerns about potential costs of...

This paper draws lessons from an original randomized experiment in Malawi. In order to understand why roads in relatively good condition in rural areas may not be used by buses, a minibus service was subsidized over a six-month period over a distance of 20 kilometers to serve five villages....

The authors use an original panel dataset of migrant departures from the Philippines to identify the responsiveness of migrant numbers and wages to gross domestic product shocks in destination countries. They find a large significant elasticity of migrant numbers to gross domestic product shocks...

The adoption of new agricultural technologies may be discouraged because of their inherent riskiness. This study implemented a randomized field experiment to ask whether the provision of insurance against a major source of production risk induces farmers to take out loans to invest in a new crop...