This week we featured research on religion, hiring, Progresa, worker welfare and more...
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In 2019, Mexico’s landmark conditional cash transfer programme PROGRESA was abruptly rolled back. Fernanda Marquez-Padilla, Susan W. Parker, Tom Vogl demonstrate that this disproportionately affected boys’ educational outcomes, offering lessons for policy retrenchment worldwide.
On Tuesday, Joshua Deutschmann, Maya Duru, Kim Siegal, and Emilia Tjernström presented evidence from a bundled farm programme in western Kenya, which boosted yields and profits for smallholders by jointly tackling credit, information, and risk constraints.
In Afghanistan, Oeindrila Dube, Joshua Blumenstock, and Michael Callen use mobile phone transaction data to shed light on the nature of religious adherence, revealing that religiously motivated insurgent violence reduces religiosity while climate-induced income shocks increase religiosity.
Firms in developing countries are infamous for their poor working conditions—often justified in the name of productivity. A new research review, however, establishes that improving working conditions not only benefits workers but can also enhances firm productivity. In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Achyuta Adhvaryu provides policy insights for worker well-being in developing countries.
In today’s article, Delphine Boutin and Laurène Petitfour find that bundling health insurance with microcredit reduced out-of-pocket health expenses by 50% among informal workers in Burkina Faso without decreasing microcredit uptake, offering a promising pathway to universal health coverage.
Following the economic crisis in India due to monetisation, Yutong Chen, Gaurav Chiplunkar, Sheetal Sekhri, Anirban Sen, and Aaditeshwar Seth, show that political connections helped firms secure scarce credit, delay payments, boost investments, and grow faster.
Many businesses in developing countries hire workers from family networks. How does redistributive pressure from family influence hiring decisions? Nicholas Swanson investigates the impact of social pressure on employment and productivity in Zambia.