Women with young children are doubly challenged by the pandemic. Disproportionately responsible for caregiving, yet faced with the loss of child care options in light of the pandemic and lockdowns, they will face particular difficulties in retaining or gaining work and may face increased stress and pressures within the household. These women are already the…
Assessing the Labour Market Impact of COVID-19 on Women with Young Children in Egypt
Returns to Childcare and Capital: Experimental Evidence from Uganda
Microenterprises are an important source of employment, and developing such enterprises is a key policy concern in most countries, especially in low-income countries where they employ more than half of the labor force. While there is optimism about the power of finance for small-scale business development, a growing literature shows that success cannot be taken…
Taming Counterfeits Markets with Consumer Information
Access to quality inputs is critical to boosting agricultural productivity. However, quantitative research (Tjernström et al 2017; Bold et al 2017; Ashour et al 2019) and news reports (Muchiri 2019; Okinda 2019) find that the quality of agricultural inputs—such as seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides–is often low in rural African markets. The inability of buyers to…
Remittances and Coping with COVID‐19
The study seeks to support the Philippine COVID‐19 response by quantifying the role of international migrant remittances in helping households cope with the pandemic’s economic consequences. Remittances are known to provide important support for migrant‐origin households experiencing negative shocks. Little is known about whether migrants who are themselves experiencing negative shocks are able to provide…
Gender Effects of COVID-19: Evidence from the Kenya Life Panel Survey
Governments in many countries are implementing social distancing measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19, yet there is limited evidence about the effectiveness of these measures in low-income contexts. This is particularly true of travel restrictions/lockdowns; this, plus school closures, are likely to have major labor market implications, and potentially differential effects by gender. The…
What Can Online Vacancies Tell Us About Labour Market Conditions in Lower-Income Countries? Evidence from India
Over the last decade, the rapid diffusion of internet technologies in lower-income countries has changed how employers and workers interact in the labor market. While the initial boom in online recruitment focused on higher-wage occupations, there now exist online search and matching services for lower-wage occupations, from domestic work to entry-level retail jobs. Harnessing these…
Gender Differences in the Effects of the ‘Great Lockdown’ on Time Use
This research will address whether and how the coronavirus pandemic exacerbates barriers to gender parity in developing countries by asymmetrically affecting time use for men and women. The effects of COVID-19 are likely to differ by gender (Alon et al., 2020), but the nature and extent of those differences are uncertain. The study, therefore, proposes…
Migration, Changing Residence Patterns, and Covid-19 in India
Informal insurance through family members and temporary migration are among the most important ways that individuals in low-income countries mitigate economic shocks. Covid-19makes these traditional means of informal insurance socially costly. Temporary or permanent migrants respond to the negative economic shock of the pandemic by returning home to co-reside with family members and risk spreading…
Meet Your Future: Job Search Effort and Aspirations of Young Jobseekers
The Meet You Future Project (MYF) is an ongoing RCT designed in partnership with BRAC Uganda to investigate the relative importance of several barriers to quality employment that students face when transitioning from the educational sector into labor markets characterized by high levels of informality. The experimental setting is that of Vocational Training Institutes (VTIs) in…
Characterizing Urban Labour Market Effects of COVID and Speeding Recovery Through a Job Search Platform
The COVID-19 crisis has triggered unemployment worldwide. In developing countries, the effects are expected to be large (Mubarak and Howell 2020; Saleh and Cash 2020; Dingel and Neiman 2020); however, better data is needed to understand (1) who is most affected; (2) which job losses are expected to be temporary versus permanent, and (3) how…