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Entrepreneurs that voluntarily choose to start a business because they are able to identify a good business opportunity and act on it—opportunity entrepreneurs—might be different along various dimensions from those who are forced to become entrepreneurs because of lack of other alternatives—necessity entrepreneurs. To provide evidence on these differences, this article exploits a unique data set covering a wide array of characteristics, including cognitive skills, noncognitive skills, and managerial practices, for a large sample of female entrepreneurs in Mexico. Descriptive results show that on average opportunity entrepreneurs have better performance and higher skills than necessity entrepreneurs. A discriminant analysis reveals that discrimination is difficult to achieve based on these observables, which suggests the existence of unobservables driving both the decision to become an opportunity entrepreneur and performance. Thus, an instrumental variables estimation is conducted, using state economic growth in the year the business was set up as an instrument for opportunity, to confirm that opportunity entrepreneurs have higher performance and better management practices.

Countries are increasingly defining health benefits packages (HBPs) as a way of progressing towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Resources for health are commonly constrained, so it is imperative to allocate funds as efficiently as possible. We conducted allocative efficiency analyses using the Health Interventions Prioritization tool (HIPtool) to estimate the cost and impact of potential HBPs in three countries. These analyses explore the usefulness of allocative efficiency analysis and HIPtool in particular, in contributing to priority setting discussions. HIPtool is an open-access and open-source allocative efficiency modelling tool. It is preloaded with publicly available data, including data on the 218 cost-effective interventions comprising the Essential UHC package identified in the 3.sup.rd Edition of Disease Control Priorities, and global burden of disease data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. For these analyses, the data were adapted to the health systems of Armenia, Côte d'Ivoire and Zimbabwe. Local data replaced global data where possible. Optimized resource allocations were then estimated using the optimization algorithm. In Armenia, optimized spending on UHC interventions could avert 26% more disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), but even highly cost-effective interventions are not funded without an increase in the current health budget. In Côte d'Ivoire, surgical interventions, maternal and child health and health promotion interventions are scaled up under optimized spending with an estimated 22% increase in DALYs averted-mostly at the primary care level. In Zimbabwe, the estimated gain was even higher at 49% of additional DALYs averted through optimized spending. HIPtool applications can assist discussions around spending prioritization, HBP design and primary health care transformation. The analyses provided actionable policy recommendations regarding spending allocations across specific delivery platforms, disease programs and interventions. Resource constraints exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic increase the need for formal planning of resource allocation to maximize health benefits.

We study the impact of China’s new rural pension program on promoting migration of labor by applying a regression discontinuity analysis to this new pension program. The results reveal a perceptible difference in labor migration among adult children whose parents are just above and below the age of pension eligibility: The adult children with a parent just attaining the pension-eligible age are more likely to be labor migrants compared with those with a parent just below the pension-eligible age. We also find that with a pension-eligible parent, the adult children are more likely to have off-farm jobs. These abrupt changes in household behavior at the cutoff suggest that these households are credit constrained. In addition, we find that the pension’s effect on migration is greater among adult children with a parent in poor health; pension-eligible elderly report that they are more likely to use inpatient services when needed and less likely to rely on adult children for care when they are ill. These results suggest that (expectations regarding) providing care for elderly parents has constrained labor migration from China’s rural areas to some extent, and that the new rural pension program has helped to relax this constraint.

A U-shaped relationship between development and the labor share of income is brought to light. To do so, a panel dataset on the labor share in the manufacturing sector of developing countries is exploited. This dataset has greater coverage than the ones of previous studies focusing on developing countries. These data are also available at the disaggregated level for 28 manufacturing subsectors. This allows us to show that the U-shaped pattern of the labor share is also observed at the subsector level, suggesting that it does not correspond to reallocation forces across manufacturing subsectors during the development process. Standard theories of development economics that feature duality in the labor market easily generate such a pattern.

The conventional wisdom on firm dynamics, productivity growth, and job creation in developing countries is based on data that, by design, excludes a vast number of micro- and small enterprises, many of which are informal. Some may not view this exclusion as an issue, on the grounds that the omitted economic units reflect survivorship rather than entrepreneurship. However, the thresholds that determine the truncation of the data are relatively arbitrary, and the firms that are typically excluded are associated with a large share of total employment. This paper assesses the ways in which the conventional wisdom on developing countries would change if micro- and small enterprises were taken into account in the analyses. The assessment shows that micro- and small enterprises account for a greater share of gross job creation and destruction than acknowledged by the conventional wisdom. It also reveals a greater dispersion of firm productivity, a weaker correlation between firm productivity and firm size, and a smaller contribution of within-firm productivity gains to aggregate productivity growth. This assessment points to new directions in the data and research efforts needed to understand the role of micro- and small enterprises and to identify policies with the potential to foster job creation and aggregate productivity growth in developing countries.

Cash transfer programs are widely used in settings where child labor is prevalent. Although many of these programs are explicitly implemented to improve children's welfare, in theory their impact on child labor is undetermined. This paper systematically reviews the empirical evidence on the impact of cash transfers, conditional and unconditional, on child labor. We find no evidence that cash transfer interventions increase child labor in practice. On the contrary, there is broad evidence that conditional and unconditional cash transfers lower both children's participation in child labor and their hours worked and that these transfers cushion the effect of economic shocks that may lead households to use child labor as a coping strategy. Boys experience particularly strong decreases in economic activities, whereas girls experience such decreases in household chores. Our findings underline the usefulness of cash transfers as a relatively safe policy instrument to improve child welfare but also point to knowledge gaps, for instance regarding the interplay between cash transfers and other interventions, that should be addressed in future evaluations to provide detailed policy advice.

We use a combination of surveys of instructors and data from course syllabi to examine how the subject of development economics is taught at the undergraduate and Master’s level in over 200 courses in 56 developing countries and the United States. We find there is considerable heterogeneity in what is considered development economics: there is a narrow core of topics (growth theory, poverty and inequality, human capital, and institutions) taught in at least half the classes and large variation in the role of theory versus empirics. Employing clustering techniques, we find four views of development: a theoretical macro-based approach; an empiricalmicro-based approach; a mixed approach narrowly focused on these common core topics; and an expansive approach covering a much broader range of topics. We find country, course, and instructor characteristics are all associated with these differences in how development economics is conceptualized.

This article examines how a policy oriented toward a specific group within the population can have collateral effects on the economic decisions of other groups. In 1996, the Chilean government approved the extension of the school day from half- to full-day school. This article exploits the quasi-experimental nature of the reform’s implementation by time, municipality, and age targeting of the program in order to examine how the maternal labor supply is affected by the childcare subsidy implicit in the lengthening of the school day. Using data from the Chilean socioeconomic household survey and administrative data from the Ministry of Education for 1990–2011, we estimate that, on average, there is a 5 percent increase in labor participation and employment rates of single mothers with eligible children (between 8 and 13 years old) with no younger children, who are the group that would be mainly affected by the policy. No significant labor supply responses are detected among others mothers with eligible children.

In a meta-analysis of 126 impact evaluation studies, we find that financial education significantly impacts financial behavior and, to an even larger extent, financial literacy. These results also hold for the subsample of randomized experiments (RCTs). However, intervention impacts are highly heterogeneous: financial education is less effective for low-income clients as well as in low- and lower-middle–income economies. Specific behaviors, such as the handling of debt, are more difficult to influence and mandatory financial education tentatively appears to be less effective. Thus, intervention success depends crucially on increasing education intensity andoffering financial education at a “teachable moment.”

In parts of Asia, the South Caucasus, and the Balkans, son preference is strong enough to trigger significant levels of sex selection, resulting in the excess mortality of girls and skewing child sex ratios in favor of boys. Every year, an estimated 1.8 million girls go “missing” because of the widespread use of sex selective practices in these regions. The pervasive use of such practices is reflective of the striking inequities girls face immediately, and it also has possible negative implications for efforts to improve women’s status in the long term. Recognizing this as a public policy concern, governments have employed direct measures such as banning the use of prenatal sex selection technology, and providing financial incentives to families that have girls. This study reviews cross-country experiences to take stock of the direct interventions used and finds no conclusive evidence that they are effective in reducing the higher mortality risk for girls. In fact, bans on the use of sex selection technology may inadvertently worsen the status of the very individuals they intend to protect, and financial incentives to families with girls offer only short-term benefits at most. Instead, what seems to work are policies that indirectly raise the value of daughters. The study also underscores the paucity of causal studies in this literature.