Until recently rigorous impact evaluations have been rare in the area of finance and private sector development. One reason for this is the perception that many policies and projects in this area lend themselves less to formal evaluations. However, a vanguard of new impact evaluations on areas...

Innovation is key to technology adoption and creation, and to explaining the vast differences in productivity across and within countries. Despite the central role of the entrepreneur in the innovation process, data limitations have restricted standard analysis of the determinants of innovation...

Business training programs are a popular policy option to try to improve the performance of enterprises around the world. The last few years have seen rapid growth in the number of evaluations of these programs in developing countries. We undertake a critical review of these studies with the...

Theories of poverty traps stand in sharp contrast to the view that anybody can make it through hard work and thrift. However, empirical detection of poverty traps is complicated by the lack of long panels, measurement error, and attrition. This paper shows how dynamic pseudo-panel methods can...

The degree of mobility in incomes is often seen as an important measure of the equality of opportunity in a society and of the flexibility and freedom of its labor market. But estimation of mobility using panel data is biased by the presence of measurement error and non-random attrition from the...

This paper investigates the impact of international migration on child health outcomes in rural Mexico using a nationally representative demographic survey. Historic migration networks are employed as instruments for current household migration to the United States in order to correct for the...

We study how migration from a poor to a rich country affects key economic beliefs, preference parameters, and transnational household decision-making efficiency. Our setting is the migration of Tongans to New Zealand through a migration lottery program. In a ten-year follow-up survey of...

Measuring the gain in income from migration is complicated by non-random selection of migrants from the general population, making it difficult to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non-migrants. This paper uses a migrant lottery to overcome this problem, providing an experimental measure...

The authors examine the impact of migration on educational attainment in rural Mexico. Using historical migration rates by state to instrument for current migration, they find evidence of a significant negative effect of migration on schooling attendance and attainment of 12 to 18 year-old boys...

The paper uses individual level census and household survey data to present a rich profile of the young developing migrants around the world. Youth are found to comprise a large share of all migrants, particularly in migration to other developing countries, with the probability of migration...