To advance economic gender equality in Africa, the authors first need to know which development programs work to economically empower women. Better data on gender-informed development indicators is imperative for tracking the progress in promoting gender equality, designing interventions to...

The protection of formal institutions can help to strengthen women’s property rights, potentially improving welfare and economic efficiency of the household with broader implications. Individual land certification in women’s names and civil marriage registration offer two routes for women...

This paper examines women's power relative to that of their husbands in 23 Sub-Saharan African countries to determine how it affects women's health, reproductive outcomes, children's health, and children's education. The analysis uses a novel measure of women's empowerment that is closely linked...

Gender disparities in small and medium-size enterprise lending exist around the world and impede the growth of millions of women-led firms. This paper examines a potential driver of these disparities: gender-biased loan officers. Officer bias is measured through a novel loan application...

This paper presents early evidence from the first large-scale randomized-controlled trial of a land formalization program. The study examines the links between land demarcation and investment in rural Benin in light of a model of agricultural production under insecure tenure. The demarcation...

This paper examines how easily observable interviewer characteristics, such as gender and physical attractiveness, and more difficult to observe characteristics, such as attitudes and beliefs, affect adolescent girls' disclosure of sexual behavior during a baseline survey for an adolescent girls...

Over the last decade, Cote d’Ivoire has witnessed a remarkable shrinking of its gender gap in agricultural productivity. When comparing similar households, the gender gap has been reduced by 32 percent