Languages use different systems for classifying nouns. Gender languages assign nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine. We construct a new data set, documenting the presence or absence of grammatical gender in more than 4,000 languages which together account for more than...

We estimate the impact of Kenya's post-election crisis on individual risk preferences. The crisis interrupted a longitudinal survey of more than five thousand Kenyan youth, creating plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to civil conflict by the time of the survey. We measure individual risk...

We conducted a randomized evaluation of two labor market interventions targeted to young women aged 18 to 19 in three of Nairobi's poorest neighborhoods. One treatment offered participants a bundled intervention designed to simultaneously relieve credit and human capital constraints; a second...

We present results two years after the end of a group-based parenting intervention tested in a cluster randomized control trial in rural Kenya. The original program consisted of 16 fortnightly village-based sessions over 8 months and had large positive impacts on children's cognition and...

Bureaucratic performance is a crucial determinant of economic growth, but little real-world evidence exists on how to improve it, especially in resource-constrained settings. We conducted a field experiment of a social recognition intervention to improve record keeping in health facilities in...

This paper reports on a two-tiered experiment designed to separately identify the selection and effort margins of pay-for-performance (P4P). At the recruitment stage, teacher labor markets were randomly assigned to a pay- for-percentile or fixed-wage contract. Once recruits were placed, an...

All OECD countries except the United States offer at least four months of paid maternity leave, and the average duration of mandated paid maternity leave has increased steadily from 1970 to the present. There is some evidence that paid leave policies above a certain duration negatively impact...

Many countries remain far from achieving gender equality in the classroom. Using data from 126 countries, we characterize the evolution of gender gaps in low- and middle-income countries between 1960 and 2010. We document five facts. First, women are more educated today than 50 years ago in...

Microfinance has been heralded as an effective way to address imperfections in credit markets. From a theoretical perspective, however, the success of microfinance contracts has puzzling elements. In particular, the group-based mechanisms often employed are vulnerable to free-riding and...

Empirically observed intertemporal choices about money have long been thought to exhibit present bias, i.e. higher short-term compared to long-term discount rates. Recently, this view has been called into question on both empirical and theoretical grounds, and a spate of recent findings suggest...