Informal, low-quality employment in micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) remains a significant challenge in low- and middle-income countries. We present evidence from a consulting program in Côte d'Ivoire that advised firms on business management practices to show that a low-cost intervention can help improve job formality, without imposing undue financial burdens on firms. Using a...
This study investigates whether women place more or less importance on their social image of being socially responsible than men in a controlled lab-in-the-field experiment conducted in rural India. Participants in the experiment perform a simple task to generate a monetary endowment, donate a contribution from this earned endowment in private to an environmental NGO, and finally elicit their...
This paper introduces a new method for estimating and mapping the size and spatial distribution of the middle class, leveraging geospatial data and machine learning techniques, and provides the first granular overview of the middle class in Africa. Existing middle-class definitions, based on income or expenditure thresholds and typically estimated using survey data, have never been available...
The Strengthening Women's Economic Empowerment Project (SWEEP) in Afghanistan was a US$2.74 million community-level intervention implemented by the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) in cooperation with the World Bank in pilot areas of Afghanistan. SWEEP formed clusters of existing savings groups and provided capital to fund additional loans among cluster members. It further distributed business...
This paper tests the hypothesis that British colonial institutions promoted sexual prejudice—defined as negative attitudes toward sexual minorities—in postcolonial societies. We document five main findings. First, after accounting for differences in contemporary income per capita, OLS estimates from a cross-country sample of former European colonies reveal that former British colonies exhibit...
Ensuring financial security for old age is a critical concern for rural smallholder farmers who mainly rely on intergenerational transfers. However, economic and demographic developments affect the intergenerational future transfers and expectations around them with potentially adverse consequences for private savings efforts. This study explores saving preferences of rural smallholder farmers...
Colonization has profoundly impacted the economic and financial development trajectory in the colonized countries. However, previous work has not yet explored the impact of colonization on present-day fertility outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This paper investigates the influence of colonial legacy on fertility through colonial legal institutions and the identity of the colonizer....
Granular and repeated measurements of socio-economic outcomes are essential for understanding and improving economic livelihoods, but detailed survey data is scarce, especially across low-and-middle income countries. Recent machine learning approaches successfully leverage non-traditional data such as remote sensing data to predict consumption expenditures and asset wealth across locations but...
How does supervision impact worker performance? This paper examines the effects of frontline supervision on the speed and quality of production in a Ugandan data-collection firm. We conducted a field experiment, varying the timing and intensity of supervision amongworkers, to study the effects of supervision onworker performance.We find that, following increased supervision, workers...
Bottom-up initiatives based on local capacity building have become a popular alternative to the traditional top-down provision of local public goods. This study compares the effectiveness of these two approaches. Based on a randomized controlled trial with 120 communities in rural El Salvador, we assess the impact of two interventions addressing solid waste contamination: (i) a top-down...
