Using the 2004-05 India Human Development Survey data, we estimate and decompose the earnings of household businesses owned by historically marginalized social groups known as Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SCSTs), and non-SCSTs across the earnings distribution. We find clear differences in...

We exploit the variation in the admissions process across colleges of a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on: cognitive attainment using scores on standardized university exams; behavioural preferences such as risk, competitiveness, and...

The COVID-19 pandemic showed that many developing countries could not respond effectively to crises due to their limited capacity to diversify their social protection responses. Social protection systems depend mainly on government tax revenue capacity. Raising domestic revenue still represents...

This study investigates the short-term impacts of an aggregate socioeconomic shock on household food consumption and children's nutrition using the case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mozambique. In response to the economic downturn, households are expected to adjust their food choices both in...

This paper estimates the returns to education and their implications for wage inequality using data from the 2015/16 Namibia Income and Expenditure Survey. The paper employs recentred influence function regression to analyse the impact of education across the wage distribution and uses a...

The World Bank is uniquely positioned to identify and disseminate innovative development practices. Based on his thirty-year experience as a World Bank staff member, the author takes an institutional perspective on the innovation climate at the World Bank focusing on dominant development...

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are now widely used in development economics. However, their use is often resisted by non-governmental development organizations. The objections they raise differ between the three types of activities of such non-governmental organizations (NGOs): capacity...

The rapid economic growth experienced within the past two decades in China highly correlates with childhood overweightness. The epidemic has become an issue of grave concern. A principal factor considered to be responsible for the epidemic in the literature is unhealthy food intake, such as...

The focus of this paper is the role played in rural contexts by contract farming agreements between smallholders and private investors. These contracts can take different forms, but in general are agreements under which producers commit to supply produce to a buyer firm. They are - at least on...

This paper analyses the implication of contract farming on gender inequalities in rural Mozambique. Contract farming is often considered one of the major tools of agribusiness development: it broadly includes those arrangements under which producers commit to provide a pre-defined quantity of...