Search Results
Working Paper
Can Self-Help Groups Really Be 'Self-Help'?
We provide an experimental and theoretical evaluation of a cost-reducing innovation in the delivery of "self-help group" microfinance services, in which privatized agents earn payments through membership fees for providing services. Under the status quo, agents are paid by an outside donor and offer members free services. In our multi-country randomized control trial we evaluate the change in this incentive scheme on agent behavior and performance, and on overall village-level outcomes. We find that privatized agents start groups, attract members, mobilize savings, and intermediate loans at ...
Working Paper
Financial Development and International Trade
This paper studies the industry-level and aggregate implications of financial development on international trade. I set up a multi-industry general equilibrium model of international trade with input-output linkages and heterogeneous firms subject to financial frictions. Industries differ in capital-intensity, which leads to differences in external finance dependence. The model is parameterized to match key features of firm-level data. Financial development leads to substantial reallocation of international trade shares from labor- to capital-intensive industries, with minor effects at the ...
How Is the Challenge of Finding Childcare Affecting Labor Force Participation? Perspectives from Employers Across the Seventh District
Through the Chicago Fed Survey of Economic Conditions (CFSEC) and during roundtable discussions with business, nonprofit, and government leaders, the Chicago Fed asked employers from a variety of sectors for their perspectives on how childcare access has affected labor force availability.1 These survey and roundtable findings contribute to the Chicago Fed’s Spotlight on Childcare—an effort to increase our understanding of how the lack of access to childcare impedes labor force participation in the Seventh Federal Reserve District. In this article, we summarize the responses from over 100 ...
Discussion Paper
Fragmentation in Workforce Development and Efforts to Coordinate Regional Workforce Development Systems: A Case Study of Challenges in Atlanta and Models for Regional Cooperation from across the Country
The importance of human capital in regional economic competitiveness is increasingly apparent. However, structural changes, fragmentation, the instability of funding, and other factors have led to challenges for workforce development providers as well as workforce development systems. This fragmentation has created a less coherent and coordinated workforce development system. Often, metropolitan areas have many programs and policies in place to train workers for jobs that require sub baccalaureate credentials or skills. The lack of coordination in local training systems may limit the ...
Report
Germs, Social Networks, and Growth
Does the pattern of social connections between individuals matter for macroeconomic outcomes? If so, where do these differences come from and how large are their effects? Using network analysis tools, we explore how different social network structures affect technology diffusion and thereby a country's rate of growth. The correlation between high-diffusion networks and income is strongly positive. But when we use a model to isolate the effect of a change in social networks, the effect can be positive, negative, or zero. The reason is that networks diffuse ideas and disease. Low-diffusion ...
Report
Accounting for breakout in Britain: The Industrial Revolution through a Malthusian lens
This paper develops a simple dynamic model to examine the breakout from a Malthusian economy to a modern growth regime. It identifies several factors that determine the fastest rate at which the population can grow without engendering declining living standards; this is termed maximum sustainable population growth. We then apply the framework to Britain and find a dramatic increase in sustainable population growth at the time of the Industrial Revolution, well before the beginning of modern levels of income growth. The main contributions to the British breakout were technological improvements ...
Journal Article
The Aggregate Implications of Size-Dependent Distortions
This article examines the aggregate implications of size-dependent distortions. These regulations misallocate labor across firms and hence reduce aggregate productivity. The author then considers a case study of labor laws in France, where firms with 50 employees or more face substantially more regulation than firms with fewer than 50. The size distribution of firms is visibly distorted by these regulations: There are many firms with exactly 49 employees. A quantitative model is developed with a payroll tax of 0.15 percent that applies only to firms with more than 50 employees. Removing the ...
Working Paper
Family Economics Writ Large
Powerful currents have reshaped the structure of families over the last century. There has been (i) a dramatic drop in fertility and greater parental investment in children; (ii) a rise in married female labor-force participation; (iii) a significant decline in marriage and a rise in divorce; (iv) a higher degree of positive assortative mating; (v) more children living with a single mother; (vi) shifts in social norms governing premarital sex and married women's roles in the workplace. Macroeconomic models explaining these aggregate trends are surveyed. The relent-less flow of technological ...
Working Paper
Financial Development and International Trade
This paper studies the industry-level and aggregate implications of financial development on international trade. I set up a multi-industry general equilibrium model of international trade with input-output linkages and heterogeneous firms subject to financial frictions. Industries differ in capital-intensity, which leads to differences in external finance dependence. The model is parameterized to match key features of firm-level data. Financial development leads to substantial reallocation of international trade shares from labor- to capital-intensive industries, with minor effects at the ...
Working Paper
What Is the Equity-Efficiency Tradeoff when Maintaining Wells in Rural Haiti?
This paper quantitatively compares water infrastructure interventions that prioritize equity with those that prioritize efficiency. The community-based model developed by Haiti Outreach (HO) trains communities to operate and maintain wells, and has clear effi ciency gains over the status quo aid model in Haiti that gives communities wells: HO?s wells were 8.7 percentage points more likely to be functioning after one year than similarly-constructed wells managed under the status quo model. Because HO?s model includes user fees, which raise concerns about equity, I quantify the ...