The tasks workers perform on the job are informative about the direction and the impact of technological change. We harmonize occupational task content measures between two worker-level surveys, which separately cover developing and developed countries. Developing countries use routine-cognitive...

Technology is the driver of labor allocation across sectors and occupations. Is the impact of technological change on developing countries similar to its impact on developed countries? Will developing countries follow the same development path that developed economies have taken? Our approach...

The tasks workers perform on the job are informative about the direction and the impact of technological change. We harmonize occupational task-content measures between two worker-level surveys, which separately cover developing and developed countries. Developing countries use routine-cognitive...

This paper finds that reforms introduced by the IMF to promote transparency have created more informed markets and reduced borrowing costs for those emerging market countries that volunteered for them. Using a quarterly panel estimation with fixed country effects, we find that sovereign spreads...

We review the empirical evidence on microfinance and asset grants to the ultra poor or microentrepreneurs and use quantitative economic theory to account for this evidence. Properly executed, these interventions can help segments of the population increase their income and consumption, but...

The destructive economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic was distributed unequally across the population. Gender, race and ethnicity, age, education level, and a worker's industry and occupation all mattered. We analyze the initial negative effect and the lingering effect through the recovery...

Shutting down the workplace is an effective means of reducing contagion, but can incur large economic losses. We construct an exposure index, which measures infection risks across occupations, and a work-from-home index, which gauges the ease with which a job can be performed remotely across...