When is the rigorous impact evaluation of development projects a luxury, and when a necessity? This Paper studies one high-profile case: the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), an experimental and intensive package intervention to spark sustained local economic development in rural Africa. it...

Labor markets are increasingly global. Overseas work can enrich households but also split them geographically, with ambiguous net effects on decisions about work, investment, and education. These net effects, and their mechanisms, are poorly understood. This study investigates a policy...

Although measured remittances by migrant workers have soared in recent years, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. This paper reviews existing explanations for this puzzle and proposes three new ones. First, it offers evidence that a large majority of...

Conditional Cash Transfers are increasingly used by development aid agencies to reduce the incentives for migration from low-income countries. The evidence to date suggests that such transfers typically increase the rate of migration when they are conditional on investment, such as investment in...

The past several decades have witnessed a rebirth of global labor mobility. Workers have begun to move between countries at rates not seen since before World War One. During the same period, economists' study of international migration has been framed by a particular textbook model of location...