Search

This article inspects the relationship between fertility and employment, providing an explanatory mixed-method analysis to gauge their nexus for rural and urban Albania over the 2000s. We instrument reproductive decisions with having two first-born daughters in a 2SLS model of employment. We show that having an additional child negatively influences employment probability for rural mothers, but not for women in urban areas. Heterogeneous analyses show that rural women who lack education or wealth are more dependent on their fertility decisions, whilst there are no relevant differences by occupation types. We further show that the fertility effect is reinforced by the characteristics of the rural household, such as the presence of seniors in the household or if the partner is working. We then examine qualitatively how structural and contextual settings influence women in their decisions. We inspect the experience of rural women and employers from three distinct rural municipalities. Interviews reveal several obstacles that create a gap between employer and employee expectations, resulting in females refusing job offers. The qualitative findings suggest that targeted policies on transport, childcare, and employment services are essential aspects of policy-making to favour rural and distant women's integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the effects of digital labour platforms in a context characterised by high informality, exploring the way platforms may or may not imply a disruption in this respect. To do so, it examines the labour transitions that lead to platform labour, taking into account the formal status of workers before and after joining platforms, as well as their evaluation of resulting labour conditions. The article relies on a quantitative survey and in depth interviews for three on‐demand occupations in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, ride‐hailing, home repairs and domestic service. Results show that a platform's influence on the formal status of workers (and their assessment of it) is highly contingent upon: the platform's business model, including the legal status that may be used to integrate the workforce, the pre‐existing formal/informal dynamics within the occupation and the general labour market situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development actors are always seeking reliable and cost-effective methods to assess the impact of their programmes. In particular, there are frequently calls to evaluate programmes for which no pre-intervention (or 'baseline') data are available. In these cases, evaluators often rely on retrospective survey questions to reconstruct the baseline situation. This article explores the accuracy of such retrospective survey data, using data from two surveys carried out nearly six years apart among women in rural Ethiopia. We find that the proportion of survey items for which baseline data and retrospective data do not agree is 22%. Responses to the retrospective questions are more closely associated with respondents' situation at the time of the survey than with their situation at the time they were being asked to recall. Consequently, 72% of respondents were allocated to different quintiles of household wealth, depending on whether the true baseline or the retrospective baseline data were used. We show that controlling for retrospective baseline data can considerably underestimate the impact of the intervention being evaluated. This suggests that there is a need for caution in interpreting the findings of evaluations based on such data and in drawing policy conclusions from them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the relationship between household welfare and informality, measuring household informality as the share of members' activities (hours worked or income) without social insurance. We discretize these measures into four bins or portfolios and assess their influence on consumption, as a measure of welfare. Cross-sectional regressions for five urban Sub-Saharan African countries reveal a non-linear relationship between the depth of informality and household welfare. A mixed formality household portfolio has at least the same welfare as a fully formal one. Using panel data for Nigeria, we assess household switches in informality portfolios, accounting for the selection on unobservables, and find it explains most welfare differences. Switching informality portfolios does not change welfare trajectories, with the notable exception of welfare gains for fully informal households becoming fully formal. From a policy perspective, our results suggest that policies incentivizing the formalization of the marginal worker may not result in perceivable welfare effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the relationship between borrowing and internal migration. Exploiting the micro-finance scheme Village Fund in Thailand, it investigates the short- and medium-term effects of borrowing since the policy's introduction. Employing an instrumental variables approach, borrowing is instrumented using the inverse number of households per village at the beginning of the policy to capture potential credit availability. The findings suggest that internal migration in Thailand is not credit constrained and its interaction with credit is time-related. Borrowing reduces internal migration in the medium-term, but is found not to affect migration when the policy is first introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]