Advancing Gender Equality and Labor Markets in Low-Income Countries

By Laura Boudreau, Ada González-Torres, and Sylvain Chassang

In developing countries, misbehavior within organizations often goes unpunished due to weak governance. Employees whose livelihoods are precarious are especially vulnerable. Governance tools that safely provide voice and remedy may dramatically improve workers’ welfare. Legal scholars have proposed reporting escrows to facilitate coordination among multiple victims of harassment (Ayres and Unkovic, 2012), but little...

By Ananya Kotia and Utkarsh Saxena

This initiative focuses on the digitization of India’s historical labor records from the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI), Part II, spanning 1960–2000. These records, previously inaccessible, offer monthly data on critical labor metrics—working days, man-days, absenteeism, turnover, and earnings. By digitizing and preserving these datasets, this project transforms them into a publicly accessible data...

By Lawrence Edwards and Godfrey Kamutando

This paper analyses labour market segmentation within and between the formal and informal manufacturing sector in an emerging economy, Zimbabwe, and studies the potential role of labour market policies and rent-sharing in driving these outcomes. The estimates exploit the panel dimension of a matched employer-employee dataset of Zimbabwean manufacturing firms collected between 2015 and...

By Stefano Caria, Caroline Krafft, Bruno Crepon, and Abdelrahman Nagy

Can making jobs easier to find and keep raise female employment in societies where gender norms discourage women from working? We report the results of an experiment in Egypt — a country where social norms limiting female employment are widely held, but many women nevertheless look for work and identify lack of childcare as...

By Kjetil Bjorvatn, Selim Gulesci, Arne Nasgowtiz, Denise Ferris, Vincent Somville, and Lore Vandewalle

The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown policies that followed led to a sharp economic downturn. Many countries used cash transfers to curb the negative effects on vulnerable households but little is known about the effects of such transfers in a time of crisis, when markets are closed and movements are restricted. In this paper,...