Publications (997)

THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | A growing literature has documented widespread variation in the extent to which insurgents provide public goods, collect taxes, and regulate civilian conduct. This paper offers what is, to our knowledge, the first study of the long-term economic legacies of rebel...

THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This article studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in Delhi, India. First, the study finds that men’s employment declined by 84 percentage points during the pandemic...

In this study, we provide causal evidence of the immediate and near-term impact of stringent COVID-19 lockdown policies on employment outcomes, using Ghana as a case study. We take advantage of a specific policy setting, in which strict stay-at-home orders were issued and enforced in two spatially...

Mozambique experienced important reductions in the poverty rate until recently, before two major natural disasters hit, an armed insurgency stroke in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, and the country started suffering from a hidden debt crisis with associated economic slowdown. As the last...

THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This study investigates the short- and medium-term impact of a randomized group-based early child development program targeting parents of children aged 6–24 months in a poor, rural district of Rwanda. This low-intensity, short-duration, and low-cost program engaged...

THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | We examine how returns to education have evolved in the context of post-conflict reconstruction and economic growth in Mozambique over the period 1996–2015. We show that private rates of return to education have declined at lower levels of schooling, but remained...

A plethora of work has been done on the effectiveness of foreign aid. However, virtually none of the previous cross- country macro studies have investigated the impact of aid on social cohesion. Yet, in order to promote the achievement of the targets in SDG 16, donors and global partners of...

In this study, we develop an empirical framework that allows us to trace out a time path of metal prices. This framework shows that unpredictable shifts in demand, extraction costs and discovery of reserves, make estimation of the slope of this underlying trend an empirical question. Further, the...

THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, sub-Saharan African countries faced the dilemma of how to minimize viral transmission without adversely affecting the poor. This study proposes an index of lockdown readiness, taking into account housing conditions and income...

THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | We explore the relationship between household welfare and informality, measuring household informality as the share of members’ activities (hours worked or income) without social insurance. We discretize these measures into four bins or portfolios and assess their...