We are pleased to announce the launch of the second open call for proposals within the G²LM|LIC programme (phase VI of the overall programme).
Large- and small-scale research grants are offered on issues related to gender, labor and growth in LICs. The deadline for submission is April 10, 2023. Please check the details here. We are looking forward to receiving many great proposals!
Labour is the sole endowment of the poor and the main factor of production in all economies. Therefore, understanding whether labour is employed efficiently is key to understanding poverty at the micro level and differences in national income at the macro level. In this working paper, the authors use the Jobs of the World database to discuss evidence to show how the nature of jobs and their allocation vary within countries by wealth and gender and across countries in stages of development.
The key contribution of the paper lies in documenting broad transformations in the organisation of labour- that is the nature of jobs and their allocation. Authors outline the transformation in three stages: 1) Marketisation of work; 2) Replacement of self-employed work by wage work; 3) Increasing variety of available occupations. This alludes to the fact that the nature of jobs changes over the course of development from subsistence work to self-employed work to increasingly specialised wage work, but wealth and gender shape the allocation of these changing jobs in the same way throughout. Furthermore, the emergence of more specialised occupations coincides with occupational segregation of the labour force by gender which results in misallocation of talent. This is clear evidence that social norms play a crucial role in organisation of labour. Participation in market work varies enormously even within countries with very similar levels of income. For example, the interquartile range of the share of women who hold paid jobs is around 20 percentage points within every decile of GDP. The dispersion is highest in the lowest decile of GDP at 25 percentage points and only 10 percentage points in the highest decile. To study the role of norms the authors present a systematic meta-analysis on active labour market intervention for female labour market participation. Read the detailed Working Paper here.
It is repeatedly argued that the potential effects of giving cash grants to poor people are constrained by the fact that this income group is trapped in poverty, generating little permanent income effect. However, the literature points to mixed results, not only within short- and longer-term evaluations, but also between them. Therefore, the timing of a long-term study and the potential heterogeneity, specifically by gender, may play an important role in the effects of cash grants.
Motivated by the above, this working paper’s researchers set themselves to experimentally assess the long-run impacts of a randomized cash grant in Uganda on three pre-specified outcomes (after 4, 9, and 12 years), including a heterogeneity analysis by gender. By randomly assigning beneficiaries of the Ugandan YOP (Young Opportunities Program) to their treatment and control groups, the investigators find that although the positive income effects recognized after 4 years had vanished after 9 years, they were again found to be positive in this study during the Covid-19 pandemic. Also, considerably stronger positive effects on men should be highlighted, even though these income effects do not translate into higher food security. Read the detailed Working Paper here.
Millions of African youth struggle to enter the labor force. Many would like to start their own businesses, but may lack the capital, business skills, and market intelligence required. During the years many young people spend searching for good jobs or entrepreneurial opportunities, women in particular are vulnerable to exploitation. In this context, active labor market programs that help vulnerable young women launch their own businesses can have the dual benefit of overcoming poverty traps related to credit-rationing while providing social protection for the most vulnerable.
The authors conduct a randomized trial designed as a cash-benchmarked evaluation, comparing a one-off cash grant to a “microfranchising” intervention and a pure comparison group. The franchise program was a bundled intervention that provided business-specific training, capital, supply chain linkages, life skills training, and ongoing mentoring. The cash grant was approximately 230 US dollars. The interventions were implemented in urban Nairobi in 2016, targeting young, unemployed women.
The job search process is complex and rife with information frictions. We partner with an online job portal to provide over 6,000 job seekers in India with customized and timely information about labor market conditions for their preferred city and occupation on the portal. Specifically, we randomly provide information regarding vacancies (demand), searchers (supply), or both (tightness); a control group receives only general job search guidance. We find that treated respondents are 10% more likely to be employed than control respondents six months after treatment. This positive effect is driven by those with less optimistic beliefs about finding new employment at baseline; these individuals adjust their search to find new jobs if unemployed and stay in the same jobs if employed at baseline. Our experiment shows how access to information about local labor market conditions can reduce frictional unemployment.
COVID-19 has triggered unemployment worldwide; evidence suggests that there will be significant divergence in the recovery between developing and developed countries (ILO 2021). In order to speed up recovery, better data is needed to understand the differential impact of COVID-19. This project builds on a job matching platform, Job Talash, created by researchers at the Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan, which generates data on job postings and applications for over 10,000 jobseekers and 1,200 firms. Using the Job Talash platform, this brief discusses the job search behaviour of job seekers and employers during COVID-19, allowing us to document the impact and recovery from COVID-19.
The COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the livelihoods of millions of people around the world. In India, the pandemic came at the heels of an already weak labor market with increasing unemployment rates, particularly among the youth. To manage the early stages of the pandemic, the government instituted a severe national lockdown from March to May 2020. To understand labor market impacts in the first year of COVID-19, we use rich administrative data on search and recruitment from a low-wage online job portal. We observe two years—2019 and 2020— of all employer and job seeker activity on the portal. This allows us to compare trends in 2020 with 2019, accounting for seasonality in labor market activity. Consistent with survey-based evidence documented by the State of Working India 2021, the observed labor market activity on the portal suggests an incomplete recovery after the national lockdown and worsening labor market conditions by the end of 2020.
In Uganda, as in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, intimate partner violence (IPV) is widespread. According to data from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics in 2016, 49.9% of ever-partnered women between 15 and 49 reports experiencing IPV at some point in their life, with 29.9% reporting that it happened at some point in the last 12 months (UBOS and ICF 2018).
While there is increasing evidence showing mixed effects from cash transfers to women on IPV, we know less about how economic empowerment through self-employment affects IPV. Both cash transfers and productive self-employment increase women’s incomes. However, income from self-employment depends on women’s skills and effort. This might affect IPV differently from the economic windfalls of cash transfers.
We study a skills-based entrepreneurship program in Uganda that teaches business management skills (accounting, inventory management, etc) alongside entrepreneurship skills (raising capital, growing a customer base, identifying market opportunities). We assign treated women to one of two mentoring programs: intensive mentoring, in which a coach tries to visit the women at their homes or businesses three times over the six months of the program, or opt-in mentoring, where women choose to show up for mentoring at a centralized venue. Lang and Seither (2022) show that the program has large impact on business ownership and profits. Women re-invest heavily, limiting the benefits that flow back to households.
In a companion paper (Casabianca et al. (2022)), we consider the effect the program has on IPV 12– 18 months after it ends. These effects are not obvious. Women may face pressure to allocate more of their profits to household expenditures, poEntrepreneurshiptentially causing an increase in IPV due to expropriation. Alternatively, having an independent source of income may place women in a stronger position within the household. Identifying and quantifying such effects is critical for the design of programs aimed at increasing women’s economic inclusion.
Measuring the effect of any program on IPV poses challenges because there are two possible effects: true reductions in IPV, and reductions in reported IPV. This concern is particularly relevant for programs that focus on women’s empowerment. Women who participate in such programs may be less willing to report IPV to study enumerators if they know the study is evaluating a program focused on empowerment, potentially leading to inaccurately large, negative effects on IPV.
We follow Dhar, Jain, and Jayachandran (2022) to address this concern. We use the social desirability index developed by Crowne and Marlowe (1960) to measure a respondent’s propensity to provide socially desirable answers. We then estimate heterogeneous effects on IPV based on whether a woman has above versus below-median social desirability bias. Doing so allows us to establish the social norm by observing which direction social desirability biases answers of women in the control group. The heterogeneity analysis allows us to understand whether the treatment is interacting with social desirability bias to generate under-reporting.