C. Journal articles published externally
1,144 items available
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These are journal articles by World Bank authors published externally.
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Publication
The effects of booster classes in protracted crisis settings: Evidence from Kenyan refugee camps (Published online: 13 Jul 2023)
(Taylor and Francis, 2023-10-12)Students in protracted crisis settings often face a range of challenges which combine to yield low education outcomes. This paper presents the results from a randomised controlled trial of weekend and holiday booster classes for 7th and 8th grade girls in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, that aimed to improve girls’ education outcomes and increase transition rates from primary to secondary school. While qualitative results suggested numerous advantages of the booster classes, including more freedom to ask questions, smaller class sizes, and kinder teachers, the program did not yield statistically significant effects on learning outcomes, school attendance or noncognitive skills. Mixed-methods research suggests that the limited impacts may stem from implementation challenges including irregular booster class attendance and a lack of appropriate teaching materials. More broadly, the results show the importance of accounting for implementation challenges in the reporting of impact evaluation results. -
Publication
Women in Paid Employment: A Role for Public Policies and Social Norms in Guatemala
(Taylor and Francis, 2023-05-03)With only 32% of women in the labor market, Guatemala has one of the lowest rates of female labor force participation (FLFP) in the Latin America and Caribbean region and in the world. We explore information from different micro data sets, including the most recent population censuses (2002 and 2018) to assess the drivers of recent progress. Between 2002 and 2018, FLFP increased from an average of 26% to 32% nationwide. This increase was partly explained by increases in the school attainment of women, reduction in fertility and the country’s structural transformation towards services. However, a large part of the increase remains unexplained. Exploring 2018 data, we show that social norms, attitudes towards women and public policies are important determinants of FLFP. The analysis suggests that, taken together, these factors can all become an important source of increased participation of women in the labor market moving forward. -
Publication
Centring Rights-Based Access to Self-Care Interventions
(Taylor and Francis, 2022-11-11)Ensuring sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) is fundamental to the success of the Sustainable Development Goals and a range of other global commitments. As such, innovations that can help promote SRHR, including self-care interventions, offer exciting opportunities to improve health and rights simultaneously. While self-care is not new conceptually, the growing number of evidence-based technologies, medicines and products that can be accessed outside of the formal health sector point to the role lay people play as active participants in their own health care. -
Publication
Gender norms, landholdership, and rural land use fee and agricultural income tax in Ethiopia
(Elsevier, 2022-10-01)Area-based land taxes, a form of property tax, exist where rural land markets do not exist or do not function well. Understanding how these taxes affect different groups of landholders, including by men and women, is important since a tax based on the land size is likely to have an outsized effect on smaller landholders. However, survey data allowing for an individual- and household-disaggregated analysis has been scarce. Using newly available data on tax payments and self-reported individual land ownership from the Ethiopian Socioeconomic Survey 2018/2019, this paper assessed the gender implications of an area-based rural land use fee and agricultural income tax in Ethiopia. We found that female adult-only households were more likely than dual adult households to be smallholders with less than 0.5 hectare of land, and these smallholders faced the largest per-hectare tax rates. Female-headed- and female adult-only households faced a tax incidence that was 37 percent higher than it was for male-headed and dual-adult households. The gender land ownership patterns, norms limiting women’s role in agriculture, household structures, and gender agricultural productivity gaps are likely to result in lower consumption, and consequently, a higher tax burden for women. Finally, we simulated the effect of a hypothetical tax schedule with progressive per-hectare tax rates and exemptions for smallholders and found that while this would reduce women’s tax burdens, the tax remained to be regressive because of the prevalence of landholder ship among poor households. Our study highlights the difficulty of area-based land taxes to be progressive. -
Publication
Women’s Legal Rights and Gender Gaps in Property Ownership in Developing Countries
(Wiley, 2022-06-08)Women's property ownership matters for their well-being and agency, broader economic prosperity, and children's development. However, until recently, a lack of data has constrained further exploration of gender differences in property ownership in the developing world. Using data from 41 developing countries, this paper contributes to the literature by investigating gender gaps in the incidence of property ownership among couples and the factors associated with these gaps, focusing on the role of legal systems. We find that in almost all countries, husbands are more likely to own property than wives. Across countries in our sample, husbands are, on average, 2.7 times more like than wives to own property alone and 1.4 times more likely to own property alone or jointly. Within countries, gender gaps in the incidence of property ownership are most pronounced for disadvantaged groups, that is, the rural population and the poorest quintile. These gender gaps reflect a variety of factors, including discriminatory laws with respect to inheritance, property ownership, marital regimes, and laws that protect from workplace discrimination. Countries with more gender egalitarian legal regimes have higher levels of property ownership by married women, especially housing, suggesting that legal reforms are a potential mechanism to increase women's property ownership. -
Publication
Addressing declining female labor force participation in India: Does political empowerment make a difference?
(Taylor & Francis, 2022-02)Despite income growth, fertility decline, and educational expansion, female labour force participation in rural India dropped precipitously over the last decade. Nation-wide individual-level data allow us to explore if random reservation of village leadership for females affected women’s access to job opportunities, their demand for participation in the labour force, and income as well as intra-household bargaining in the short-and medium term. Gender reservation of local leadership affected female but not male participation in public works and regular labour markets, their income, and their influence on key household decisions with a lag, suggesting that such reservation affected social norms and stereotypes. -
Publication
Saving for Dowry: Evidence from Rural India
(Elsevier, 2022-01)The ancient custom of dowry, i.e., bride-to-groom marriage payments, remains ubiquitous in many contemporary societies. Using data from 1986–2007, this paper examines whether dowry impacts intertemporal resource allocation and other household decisions in rural India. Utilizing variation in firstborn gender and dowry amounts across marriage markets, we find that the prospect of higher dowry payments at the time of a daughter’s marriage leads parents to save more in advance. The higher savings are primarily financed through increased paternal labor supply. This implies that people are farsighted; they work and save more today with payoff in the distant future. -
Publication
Does the Internet Reduce Gender Gaps? The Case of Jordan
(Taylor & Francis, 2021-09-24)This article investigates the link between digital technologies and female labor outcomes in a country with one of the lowest female labor force participation (LFP) rates. It exploits the massive roll-out of mobile broadband technology in Jordan between 2010 and 2016 to identify the effect of internet adoption on LFP, internet job search, employment, and unemployment. Using panel data at the individual level and an instrumental variable strategy, the article finds that internet adoption increases female LFP and that the effect is driven by women who were not married in 2010, who also experience declines in marriage and fertility rates in response to internet adoption. An increase in online job search explains some, but not all, of the total increase in female LFP. Only women who are older and have higher levels of education experience an increase in employment in response to gaining internet access. The internet reduces the prevalence of traditional social norms among married women, but this channel does not explain the increase in female LFP. -
Publication
Curse of the Mummy-ji: The Influence of Mothers-in-Law on Women in India
(John Wiley and Sons, 2020-08-23)Restrictive social norms and strategic constraints imposed by family members can limit women's access to and benefits from social networks, especially in patrilocal societies. We characterize young married women's social networks in rural India and analyze how inter-generational power dynamics within the household affect their network formation. Using primary data from Uttar Pradesh, we show that co-residence with the mother-in-law is negatively correlated with her daughter-in-law's mobility and ability to form social connections outside the household, especially those related to health, fertility, and family planning. Our findings suggest that the mother-in-law's restrictive behavior is potentially driven by the misalignment of fertility preferences between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. The lack of peers outside the household lowers the daughter-in-law's likelihood of visiting a family planning clinic and of using modern contraception. We find suggestive evidence that this is because outside peers (a) positively influence daughter-in-law's beliefs about the social acceptability of family planning and (b) enable the daughter-in-law to overcome mobility constraints by accompanying her to health clinics. Wiley Terms and Conditions, https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/licensing/self-archiving.html -
Publication
Engaging Men to Transform Inequitable Gender Attitudes and Prevent Intimate Partner Violence: A Cluster Randomised Controlled Trial in North and South Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo
(BMJ Global Health, 2020-05-27)Globally, one in three women worldwide report experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetime. The study objective was to understand the effectiveness of Engaging Men through Accountable Practice (EMAP), a group-based discussion series which sought to transform gender relations in communities, on intimate partner violence (IPV), gender inequitable attitudes and related outcomes. Interventions engaging men have the potential to change gender attitudes and behaviours in conflict-affected areas. However, while EMAP led to changes in gender attitudes and behaviours related to perpetration of IPV, the study showed no overall reduction of women’s experience of IPV. Further research is needed to understand how working with men may lead to long-term and meaningful changes in IPV and related gender equitable attitudes and behaviours in conflict areas.