Governments around the world have introduced a variety of programs aimed at facilitating distance learning in the home setting during school closures due to COVID-19. However, given the cross-country variations in state capacity, these programs differ significantly in terms of design, delivery,...

Since its onset in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has globally disrupted school operations, leading to a shift to some form of homeschooling arrangements. After two years, in March 2022, the government of Malaysia officially reopened all schools, ending its homeschooling program. This relatively...

This paper examines the role of work-life balance practices (WLB) in explaining the paradox of the contented female worker. After establishing that females report higher levels of job satisfaction than men in the UK, we test whether firm characteristics such as WLB and gender segregation boost...

Traditional gender norms can restrict independent migration by women, thus preventing them from taking advantage of economic opportunities in urban non-agricultural industries. However, women may be able to circumvent such restrictions by using marriage to engage in long-distance migration - if...

This paper re-examines the causal impact of military expenditure on growth in the presence of internal and external threats for the period 1990-2013 using data from 70 developing countries. We find that differences in methods, model specifications, and the underlying estimation sample partly...

Traditional gender norms can restrict independent migration by women, preventing them from taking advantage of economic opportunities in urban non-agricultural industries. However, women may be able to circumvent such restrictions by using marriage to engage in long-distance migration-if they...

Although microfinance started as a movement to improve women's economic wellbeing through increased female entrepreneurship in particular, its impact on women's attitudes toward and participation in the labour market is not fully understood. We fill this gap by combining data on branch locations...

The practice of child marriage is ubiquitous in developing countries, where one in three girls is married before the age of 18. Although most developing countries have a legal minimum age of marriage, in practice marriage age is determined by social norms rather than the law. In this paper, we...

This paper looks at the determinants of secondary school attendance in Bangladesh with a focus on the interaction between community gender norms and relative supply of madrasas (i.e. Islamic schools). We present a theoretical framework where the probability of children's school participation...

There is a broad agreement that political and economic institutions matter for long-term development. Yet relatively little is known as to how to adopt good quality institutions and reform weak or poor institutions, for which one needs to know how institutions change. This paper provides a...