Our newest publications
Female Wage Labour and Rural Development
Evidence from Kenya’s Cut-Flower Boom
By Niclas Moneke, Céline Zipfel, and Menna Bishop
Structural transformation is often characterised as a reallocation of labour from agriculture to manufacturing and services. An equally important dimension, however, is the reorganisation of work from small-scale self-employment and family production to wage employment in larger firms. This transformation has proceeded slowly in sub-Saharan Africa, where self-employment dominates and large firms capable of...
No Place Like Home? The Causal Effect of Forced Relocation
By Gharad Bryan, Simon Franklin, Tigabu Degu Getahun, and Sarah Winton
Do central slums provide essential economic and social benefits to the poor? We collected bespoke data for 5,000 households to study mass forced clearances in Addis Ababa. Evictees were offered alternative subsidized housing further from the center. Exploiting sharp clearance zone boundaries, regression-discontinuity estimates show negative impacts on social networks, but positive impacts on...
Moving Opportunity Closer:
How Public Transit Transforms Firm Composition and Employment
By Akhila Kovvuri and Karmini Sharma
Transportation infrastructure can improve workers’ access to existing economic opportunities, but it can also reshape economic opportunity itself by influencing where and what kinds of firms locate. This paper studies how public transit infrastructure influences firm location, composition, and employment at the neighborhood level. We construct novel data tracking over one million establishment entries...
Moving Opportunity Closer: Public Transit, Firm Composition and Female Employment in India
Transit stations increase firm entry, shift local firm composition toward larger consumer-facing businesses, and raise female employment
By Akhila Kovvuri and Karmini Sharma
We tend to think of transit as moving people to jobs. But what if it also moved jobs to people? India has among the lowest female labour force participation rates in the world, around 10% in Delhi in the early 2000s and 20% nationally. This research asks whether the Delhi Metro raised female employment...
Information Frictions and Gender Inequality in Online Labor Markets
By Belinda Archibong, Francis Annan, Oyebola Okunogbe, Ifeatu Oliobi, and Glory Aiyegbeni
Online labor markets have proliferated globally raising hopes that easier, less costly access to information and communication technology (ICT) and greater information transparency could reduce gender inequality in employment. Yet gender gaps in job applications and hiring persist even on digital platforms. This project investigates whether information frictions — misinformed beliefs among applicants and...
