PacDev 2026
Conference Agenda

This paper examines an underexplored determinant of women’s business performance: preferences female entrepreneurs hold over the types of customers and suppliers they want to engage with and the environments they seek to avoid. Using discrete choice experiments with 903 female entrepreneurs in Addis Ababa, we find…

Addressing gender inequities in economic participation is a crucial development goal. A common policy approaches is to prioritize or reserve resources or program access for women. In contexts where women must apply for a program, increasing women’s demand is an important margin for reducing gender gaps in access. This…

Women’s educational attainment has continuously increased across the

In many settings, women face logistical barriers to working, such as transportation and childcare. Firms could bridge these gaps by offering job amenities like firm-provided transportation, yet these amenities remain rare in developing countries. This paper asks whether adverse selection can help explain why. When…

Crop residue burning is a major source of air pollution in India, driven by the short window between rice harvesting and wheat sowing, and limited awareness of sustainable alternatives. This study evaluates the impact of subsidizing early-maturity variety rice seeds (EMV) and providing technical training on residue…

Air pollution harms labor productivity, yet little is known about whether workers adapt to chronic exposure. We address this question using 14 years of individual-level performance data from India’s premier cricket league, a setting characterized by some of the highest levels of particulate matter air pollution…

What are the political consequences of setting ambitious policy targets and failing to meet them? We study this question in the context of India's

We document that lower-income individuals in Santiago, Chile are exposed to higher concentrations of PM10 and PM2.5 while at home and when taking into account their locations throughout the entire day. The exposure gradient across income deciles when assuming individuals are at their residence 24 hours a day is…

In this paper, I study rural-to-urban spillovers, estimating the effect of rural agricultural productivity on urban population and employment growth, migration, and structural transformation in cities, utilizing the quasi-random allocation of migrants to destinations under the Transmigration Program in

Temporary migration offers a pathway to higher income, but can be disruptive to communities of origin. I investigate distortions in origin communities that arise in response to social eligibility criteria that gatekeep access to those opportunities. Specifically, I study the effects of age and marital status…

What are the impacts of different food assistance programs on refugees’ food consumption, their trading of aid-provided goods, and market prices?

Cross-border agricultural land acquisitions and frontier settlement are reshaping forested regions in Latin America. Low German Mennonite colonies represent a distinct form of transnational agrarian expansion— large, contiguous land purchases followed by the rapid development of commercial-scale agriculture—that has…

How does the uneven distribution of economic recovery shape social relations in post-conflict settings? We study a program that randomly allocated $2,000 capital grants for small business creation in communities in Iraq recovering from the 2014–2017 Islamic State (IS) conflict. We estimate both direct effects and…

Firms in developing countries often operate in structurally informal environments where illicit payments are embedded in the cost of doing business. Using primary data from the brick kiln industry in Bangladesh, we investigate whether signaling regulatory compliance can reduce illicit payments. We estimate the causal…

Effective government leadership demands skills in planning, budgeting, and personnel management, areas where business experience may be valuable. Business owners could apply their management skills in public administration to optimize resources, enhance public service delivery, or promote private sector growth.…

Designing accountability systems for bureaucracies remains a key challenge for state capacity development. We carried out a randomized control trial at-scale with local bureaucrats in Benin to investigate whether performance improves with deliberation on external evaluation reports. In the treated municipalities,…

A central challenge in the global transition to cleaner energy is how governments can design policies that deliver large social benefits while facing trade-offs in energy security, fiscal costs, and household adoption frictions. We study this question in urban Nepal, where cooking is dominated by imported LPG, but…

Urban water shortages are an increasingly urgent challenge in large cities, driven by population growth, climate change, and aging infrastructure. In

Soil salinization is a gradual but underexplored form of land degradation with growing implications for household livelihoods and economic well- being. This paper provides new evidence on its socioeconomic consequences in India by combining nationally representative household panel data from the India Human…

Accurate rainfall data are critical for understanding agricultural production in

This paper examines how parental political connections shape students’ educational investments and early labor-market outcomes. Using linked administrative microdata from Brazil and a regression discontinuity design around close mayoral elections, we identify the causal impact of parental political access on offspring…

Poor households often face trade-offs between child labor and education.

Education is broadly recognized as an important driver of economic growth and structural change. Though the number of university students in lower- income settings has grown rapidly in the past 25 years, economists and policymakers know little about this critical population. Using a unique survey of women at the…

Using 15 years of rich data following Pakistani children, we causally estimate the effects of attending a better primary school on children’s long- term outcomes. Panel test score data allow us to estimate value-added measures of school quality. Exploiting variation generated by school switches, typically driven by…

Why do some cultures and their associated values go extinct while others prevail? In this paper, we uncover a relationship between a society’s deep- rooted gender norms and its risk of cultural extinction, proxied by language loss: languages from more gender-equal societies face a higher likelihood of extinction…

Strengthening land rights can improve a range of development outcomes, leading many African governments to formalize customary land rights.

We study how religion influences economic behavior using a randomized control trial in Kisumu, Kenya. Participants attended workshops hosted by either Pentecostal or mainline Christian churches, followed by surveys and incentive-compatible choice experiments to measure altruism and investment behavior. Pooling both…

Youth unemployment affects 45% of Africans aged 18–25 (Afrobarometer, 2026), with Kenya's rate reaching 67% among ages 15–34 (Federation of Kenya Employers, 2023) and 44% in Mombasa County (Mombasa County Government, 2025). Despite expanded TVET access, graduates face structural barriers and behavioral challenges including low self-efficacy and poor job search skills. The BRIDGE program addresses this through a three-arm RCT with 720 unemployed TVET graduates in Mombasa County (n=240 per group): T0 (control), T1 (psychosocial support, weekly for eight weeks), and T2 (integrated psychosocial plus job search training, twice weekly). Data collected at baseline, midline (2 months), and endline (6 months) will identify cost-effective pathways to employment for disadvantaged youth.

I run a field experiment with 561 food retailers in urban Tanzania to answer three questions. First, do concerns about social sanctions reduce entrepreneurs' willingness to undercut the prices of competitors? Second, how variable is the compensation required for firms to engage in such price competition? Third, when…

Since 2000, more than 36 million hectares of land have been acquired by foreign investors for agricultural and natural-resource development across less-developed countries. While such investment may offer prospects for growth, the opaque nature of these acquisitions—and their potential implications for local welfare…

A vast literature has documented the effects of the surge in imports from

This paper studies how China’s 2018 National Sword Policy, which sharply restricted plastic waste imports, reshaped global waste flows and shifted pollution burdens to Indonesia. Exploiting the policy's abrupt timing and detailed data on international waste trade, satellite-derived PM2.5, and geocoded waste sites and…

We show that firms in low-income countries frequently withhold employee wages and study how workers respond to this widespread practice. Using original survey data from Lagos, Nigeria, we document that 30% of workers across firms of all sizes report delayed or unpaid salaries. To examine how workers respond to wage…

In the early stage of industrialization, large-scale manufacturing firms tend to have high turnover rates. I study three potential causes of high turnover rates in a flagship industrial park in Ethiopia with detailed administrative records on turnover for more than 50,000 workers between 2018--23. (1)

Why do poor quality employers persist in informal labor markets despite large heterogeneity in working conditions? This paper studies the role of information frictions in sustaining low quality employment relationships in urban spot labor markets in India. Using field experiments with around 300 casual construction…

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for evaluating the effects of interventions because they rely on simple assumptions. Their validity also depends on an implicit assumption: that the research process itself, including how participants are assigned, does not affect outcomes. In this paper, I…

Despite Africa representing nearly 20% of the world's population, African scholars remain dramatically underrepresented in economics and development research—especially in scholarship about African contexts. This report synthesizes mixed-method evidence from the Collaboration for Inclusive Development Research (CIDR), drawing on surveys of 500+ stakeholders, 800+ African students across ten universities, 51 faculty, and 40+ qualitative interviews. It identifies constraints across four stages of the "education-to-policy" pipeline—higher education, training and mentorship, research production, and policy impact—with funding as the most binding barrier, alongside real "bridges" including growing in-continent training opportunities and strong interest in peer-reviewed publication.

Looking to improve public service delivery, many developing countries have drastically increased the number of administrative units over the past three decades. A key component of this decentralization strategy involves decreasing the size of administrative units, which in turn reduces the geographical distance…

Many low-income youth grow up with little exposure to the world of work, leading to misinformed beliefs about education and employment. We study whether short, school-based internships can improve these beliefs and shape school-to-work transitions. Through a randomized program in more than fifty public schools across…

We evaluate the effects of teaching negotiation skills to adolescent girls in economically vulnerable compounds in Lusaka, Zambia ten years later.

Merit is not directly observed but measured, and the conditions of measurement can shape how ability is revealed. This paper provides the first causal evidence that where assessments take place can systematically bias measured performance and, in turn, the allocation of opportunity. Using administrative data from…

Exposure to household air pollution from cooking with solid fuels such as charcoal and firewood is a major health risk in many low- and middle-income settings, particularly for women. This paper examines whether providing information about these risks changes beliefs and behaviors, and whether the identity of the…

Why do spouses hide income from each other, and why would they pay to reveal it? This paper studies preferences over income privacy within households using a laboratory experiment with low-income urban couples in

Many transfer programs target women based on evidence that mothers are more likely than fathers to allocate resources toward child welfare.

Using surveys and administrative data from representative samples of drivers work- ing on three leading gig platforms in India, Indonesia, and Kenya, we document the composition, economic experiences, and labor market trajectories of platform workers. Combining platform-based earnings with operating cost data (in PPP-…

As climate change intensifies, heatwaves increasingly threaten the health and productivity of outdoor workers in the growing gig economy. We evaluate whether small, timely heatwave-indexed cash transfers can help gig delivery workers adapt to extreme heat. We implemented a randomized controlled trial with 276 delivery…

This paper studies the impact of flexible work arrangements on firm outcomes in the context of a large apparel manufacturing cluster in India.

Private enterprise development in low-income countries remains elusive, and the failure of microcredit to stimulate small firm growth poses a puzzle to the finance and development literature. Combining data from artefactual field experiments, two field experiments, and structural estimation, I show that equity-like…

Firms in Sub-Saharan Africa frequently rely on polluting, high-marginal-cost diesel generators to cope with grid unreliability. Solar-battery systems offer a cleaner, low-marginal-cost alternative. We investigate the barriers to the energy transition among 494 SMEs in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Using a randomized…

I develop an identification strategy that leverages information on treatment effect mechanisms to eliminate selection bias.

Critical mineral mining presents a strategic opportunity for low- and middle- income countries to foster domestic firm growth through spillovers. Yet, the enclave theory of mining posits that extractive industries generate weak or non-existent backward linkages to the host economy, relying instead on imports.…

What are the political costs of macro-prudential regulations? We study this in the context of India, where, following a rise in bank loan delinquency and the accompanying depletion of banks' capital, a set of early interventions was undertaken between 2015 and 2018 to restore the long-term health of major state-owned…

This paper examines the unintended consequences of size-dependent formalization policies that raise the cost of informality for firms, focusing on a provision in Vietnam’s Labor Code 2012. The policy sharply increases the financial penalty for firms with at least 10 formally contracted, paid employees that fail to…

Slum redevelopment policies are widely used to curb slum growth and regenerate urban neighbourhoods. I study the short and medium term effects of slum clearance and redevelopment on incumbent slum residents by assembling a novel residential mobility panel to track 250,000 residents over 15 years by digitising and…

Transportation infrastructure can improve workers' access to existing economic opportunities, but it can also reshape economic opportunity itself by influencing where and what kinds of firms locate. This paper studies how public transit infrastructure influences firm location, composition, and employment at the…

Africa's urban population is projected to double by 2050. While this transition is primarily driven by demographic and economic factors, this paper examines how Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) accelerates the conversion of rural land to urban use. Rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and extreme…

In this study, we evaluate whether participatory rangeland management (PRM), an intermediary aimed at helping pastoralist communities in Kenya to manage their resources including grazing lands, has altered the collective action behavior of individuals in the communities. We evaluate this using public goods games where…

Information can mobilize community collective action against environmental harms, but its impact depends on how it is delivered and by whom. Local leaders can transmit and legitimize new information, or distort and suppress it when incentives misalign. We study these trade-offs in the context of artisanal and…

Community-based targeting (CBT) that often uses community leaders as targeting agents is widely used to identify beneficiaries in social protection programs and development interventions, especially in data-scarce settings.

Through the digitization of tax systems, recent tax reforms promised substantial revenue gains for local governments across low-income settings. Yet despite important benefits, these reforms have mostly failed to curb widespread tax evasion, thus falling short of their newly created revenue potential.

Based on a randomized experiment with dairy cooperatives in western

This study estimates the impacts of refugee inflows on household food security and agricultural production in Uganda, a country notable for its large refugee population and progressive land allocation policies. Using panel data from the Resilience Index Measurement and

We study the adoption of an electronic voucher subsidy for agricultural inputs by members of farmer organizations in Uganda. We randomly assign farmer organizations to have their members offered a status quo subsidy, a higher subsidy, or no subsidy. Adoption does not increase significantly due to the status quo…

We show that large-scale public works programs targeted at rural women are not sufficient to offset the decline in women’s labor force participation driven by broader structural transformation. We examine the differential effects of agricultural mechanization on women’s employment by leveraging the staggered roll-out…

Cash transfers are a critical part of social safety nets. However, integrated programs combining cash and parenting interventions through either group- based information meetings or home visits have recently been adopted to improve child development. Working with the Burkina Faso government, we conduct a randomized…

Housing assistance programs are among the most widely used policies to provide affordable housing to low-income families worldwide. In this paper, we study a large-scale subsidized housing program in Brazil and estimate its effects on individuals who received their homes as adults and those who were exposed as…

When targeting health aid is not feasible, do communities redistribute resources to those in need? We answer this question in the context of a large-scale intervention in Northern Nigeria that provided treatment for child diarrhea (oral rehydration salts and zinc) directly to the homes of nearby households.

I show that poverty is strongly associated with reduced engagement with young children in South Africa. This engagement by parents and caregivers include stimulating interactions such as talking to or conversing with the child, singing to or with, and reading to or telling them stories. Using nationally representative…

This experiment measures the impact of financial incentives aside from their direct price effects. The widely-used policy of incentive lotteries are the ideal setting to examine such effects, since by design, most people exposed to incentive lotteries do not receive the incentive even as they become aware of it. We…

We study how the immediacy of an income shock affects labor productivity and economic decision-making. We use a lab-in-the-field experiment in

Cognitive skills are an important dimension of human capital and contribute to economic growth. It is thus important to understand how cognitive skills evolve and what affects their transmission between generations. Previous research has shed light on this in Western, high-income countries. Yet little is known about…

We investigate how kinship and generalized reciprocity shape giving and child care support in societies where market-based solutions are limited.

Concerns about the impact of smartphones and social media have risen alongside their widespread adoption. We study whether education can strengthen internal regulatory capacities in digital environments designed to capture attention and shape beliefs. Building on the idea of self-command —the ability to align behavior…

The widespread global adoption of smartphones and rise of AI-powered mental health digital tools has generated enthusiasm about their potential to expand access to mental health support at a low cost. Yet questions remain about their effectiveness, user engagement, and the risk of exacerbating isolation or crowding…

There are many barriers to firm profitability and growth in developing countries, including issues of trust and fraud that limit firms to suppliers in their social networks. Digital IDs may ease these frictions; identity verification and signature authentication may allow businesses to expand their networks and…

Market isolation remains a key barrier to rural development, and basic digital connectivity alone rarely ensures meaningful market access. We evaluate China’s nationwide “E-commerce into Countryside” (ECC) project, which bundled online platforms with logistics, training, and promotion to address the “last mile”…

When information about productivity is incomplete, visible markers of poverty can act as biased signals that distort hiring and reduce allocative efficiency. I study one such marker, oral appearance, and its effect on early hiring decisions in urban India. Unlike traits such as race or caste, oral appearance is…

Socioemotional skills (SES) programs are widely used to promote economic empower- ment, yet their returns may vary by skill-type and gender. This paper evaluates an SES intervention for 4,500 agribusiness owners in a large-scale government program in

Taller people earn more, especially in developing countries. We present among the first evidence of this phenomenon in East Africa, using unique longitudinal microdata on a cohort of middle-aged Kenyan adults. We document a substantial height/earnings premium: controlling for gender, age, and other socio-demographics,…

We study how the integration of different groups affects social learning.