Our newest publications
Hold the Phone: The Short- and Long-Run Impacts of Connecting Indian Women to Digital Technology
By Giorgia Barboni, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Simone Schaner, Charity Troyer Moore, Anwesha Bhatacharya, Natalie Rigol, and Aruj Shukla
Access to smartphones and mobile internet is increasingly necessary to participate in the modern economy. Yet women significantly lag men in digital access, especially in lower-income settings with gender gaps that span other dimensions – and where digital gaps threaten to deepen existing analog inequities. We study the short- and longterm effects of a...
How to Get Firms to Invest in Safe Workplaces: Evidence from Urban India
By Livia Alfonsi, Lori A. Beaman, Anisha Sharma, and Karmini Sharma
This project studies how to encourage firms in Delhi’s retail sector to act on workplace safety for women, a setting where formal safeguards are limited and women’s employment is low. We ask the following question: can different messages motivate employers to not just express an interest in sexual harassment prevention training but to actually...
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...
