Two of the most salient trends in migration and development over the last two decades are the large rise in remittances and in the flow of skilled migrants. However, recent literature based on cross-country regressions has claimed that more educated migrants remit less, leading to concerns that...

Innovation policy aims to foster collaborations between science and industry in many countries, but there is little evidence for the effectiveness of such efforts in developing countries. We use regression discontinuity to measure the impact of funding from Poland's In-Tech program on innovation...

We examine the long-term impacts of international migration by comparing immigrants who had successful ballot entries in a migration lottery program, and first moved almost a decade ago, with people who had unsuccessful entries into those same ballots. The long-term gain in income is found to be...

We conducted a field experiment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil to test which government actions work to encourage informal firms to register. We find zero or negative impacts of information and free cost treatments and a significant but small increase in formalization from inspections. The local...

Remittances are a major source of external financing for many developing countries, but the cost of sending them remains high in many migration corridors. Despite efforts to lower these costs by offering new products and developing cost-comparison information sources, many new and promising...

We use a combination of surveys of instructors and data from course syllabi to examine how the subject of development economics is taught at the undergraduate and Master's level in over 200 courses in 56 developing countries and the United States. We find there is considerable heterogeneity in...

A strong theoretical argument for focusing on access to finance is that financial market imperfections can result in large inefficiencies, as firms with productive investment opportunities underinvest. Lack of access to finance is a frequent complaint of microenterprises, which account for a...

Small-scale entrepreneurs typically cite access to finance as the most important constraint to growth. Recent randomized experiments have shown the return to capital to be very high for the average microenterprise in Sri Lanka. An intervention was designed to improve access to credit among these...

The social and economic consequences of poor mental health in the developing world are presumed to be significant, yet remain underresearched. This study uses data from nationally representative surveys in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Indonesia, and Mexico and from special surveys in India and Tonga...

The social and economic consequences of poor mental health in the developing world are presumed to be significant, yet remain underresearched. This study uses data from nationally representative surveys in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Indonesia, and Mexico and from special surveys in India and Tonga...