We report an experiment in 3,000 villages that tested whether incentives improve aid efficacy. Villages received block grants for maternal and child health and education that incorporated relative performance incentives. Subdistricts were randomized into incentives, an otherwise identical program without incentives, or control. Incentives initially improved preventative health indicators, parti...

The variance in the logarithms of per capita GDP in purchasing-power-parity prices increased in the world from 1960 to 1968 and decreased since the mid 1970s. In the later period the convergence in intercountry incomes more than offset any increase in within country inequality. Approximately two-thirds of this measure of world inequality is intercountry, three-tenths interhousehold within count...

An unresolved debate in the development literature concerns the impact of gender inequality on economic growth. Previous studies have found that the effect varies, depending on the measure of inequality (wages or capabilities). This paper expands that discussion by considering both the shortand long-run, evaluating the effects of gender equality in two types of economies—semi-industrialized eco...

Using controlled experiments to compare the risk attitude and willingness to compete of husbands and wives in 500 couples in rural Vietnam, we find that women are more risk averse than men and that, compared to men, women are less likely to choose to compete, irrespectively of how likely they are to succeed. Our findings suggest that women are more likely to self-select into economic activities...

Updating, Self-Confidence and Discrimination In a laboratory experiment, we show that subjects incorporate irrelevant group information into their evaluations of individuals. Individuals from on average worse performing groups receive lower evaluations, even if they are known to perform equally well as individuals from better performing groups. Our experiment leaves room neither for statistical...

This paper examines whether disease burdens, especially prevalent in the tropics, contribute significantly to widening gender gaps in educational attainments. We estimate the impact of sudden exposure to the 1986 meningitis epidemic in Niger on girls’ education relative to boys. Our results suggest that increases in meningitis cases during epidemic years significantly reduce years of education ...

This paper asks whether targeting welfare benefits to women can be effective at changing household spending. We provide empirical evidence on this question by using a reform to the UK tax-credit system in 2003 as a quasi-experiment. We find that the reform caused low-income households to reallocate spending towards children’s goods. The results further demonstrate that the effects of directing ...

The variance in the logarithms of per capita GDP in purchasing-power-parity prices increased in the world from 1960 to 1968 and decreased since the mid 1970s. In the later period the convergence in intercountry incomes more than offset any increase in within country inequality. Approximately two-thirds of this measure of world inequality is intercountry, three-tenths interhousehold within count...

This paper studies the effect of cultural attitudes on childcare provision, fertility, female labour force participation and the gender wage gap. Cross-country data show that fertility, female labour force participation and childcare are positively correlated with each other, while the wage gap seems to be negatively correlated with these variables. The paper presents a model with endogenous fe...

Israel’s 1994 adoption of free in vitro fertilization (IVF) provides a natural experiment for how fertility time horizons impact women’s marriage timing and other outcomes. We find substantial increase average age at first following the policy change, using both men Arab-Israeli women as comparison groups. This shift appears to be driven by increased marriages older younger delaying marriage. A...