People migrate to improve their well-being. Yet a large literature suggests that migration can be a stressful process, with potentially negative impacts on mental health. However, to truly understand the effect of migration one must compare the mental health of migrants to what their mental...

Recorded remittances to Africa have grown dramatically over the past decade. Yet data limitations still mean relatively little is known about which migrants remit, how much they remit and how their remitting behaviour varies with gender, education, income levels and duration abroad. This paper...

We use randomized grants to generate shocks to capital stock for a set of Sri Lankan microenterprises. We find the average real return to capital in these enterprises is 4.6%-5.3% per year), substantially higher than market interest rates. We then examine the heterogeneity of treatment effects....

We report on a field experiment providing random grants to microenterprise owners. The grants generated large profit increases for male owners but not for female owners. We show that the gender gap does not simply mask differences in ability, risk aversion, entrepreneurial attitudes, or...

The majority of economic decisions are forward-looking and thus involve expectations of future outcomes. Understanding the expectations that individuals have is thus of crucial importance to designing and evaluating policies in health, education, finance, migration, social protection, and many...

Eliciting subjective probability distributions in developing countries is often based on visual aids such as beans to represent probabilities and intervals on a sheet of paper to represent the support. We conduct an experiment in India which tests the sensitivity of elicited expectations to...

The term "brain drain" dominates popular discourse on high-skilled migration, and for this reason, we use it in this article. However, as Harry Johnson noted, it is a loaded phrase implying serious loss. It is far from clear that such a loss actually occurs in practice; indeed, there is an...

A unique survey which tracks worldwide the best and brightest academic performers from three Pacific countries is used to assess the extent of emigration and return migration among the very highly skilled, and to analyze, at the microeconomic level, the determinants of these migration choices....

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...

This study uses administrative data to evaluate the impact of Minas Fácil Expresso, a programme in the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil, which expanded a business start-up simplification programme to more remote municipalities. Using difference-in-differences with 56 months of registration data...