Goldstein, Markus

Person:
Goldstein, Markus

Africa Gender Practice and Development Research Group, World Bank

Author Name Variants

Goldstein, Markus, Goldstein, Markus Paul, Goldstein, Markus P., Goldstein, M.

Fields of Specialization

Trade, Agriculture and Rural Development, Social Development, Gender

ORCID

0000-0002-6971-7259

External Links

Blog: Voices
RePEc
Blog: Development Impact

Departments

Africa Gender Practice and Development Research Group, World Bank

Last updated: May 6, 2025

Biography

Markus Goldstein is a development economist with experience working in Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, and South Asia. He is currently the Gender Practice Leader in the Africa Region and a Lead Economist in the Research Group of the World Bank. His current research centers on issues of gender and economic activity, focusing on agriculture and small scale enterprises. He is currently involved in a number of impact evaluations on these topics across Africa. Markus has taught at the London School of Economics, the University of Ghana, Legon, and Georgetown University. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 95

Certified to Stay?: Long-Run Experimental Evidence on Land Formalization and Widows’ Tenure Security in Benin
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-18) Botea, Ioana; Goldstein, Markus; Houngbedji, Kenneth; Kondylis, Florence; O'Sullivan, Michael; Selod, Harris
In settings where women’s land rights are informal, the death of a husband can severely limit a widow’s access to land and her ability to remain in her home — especially in the absence of a male heir. This paper examines whether large-scale land formalization programs can improve widows’ land access. Using data from a randomized controlled trial in rural Benin, the analysis finds that widows in villages with land formalization are more likely to stay in their homes four years after the program, with the strongest effects among those without a male heir. The paper identifies two key mechanisms: enhanced community recognition of women’s land rights and greater decision-making power over land resources. These findings highlight the potential of land formalization to strengthen women’s tenure security and promote their long-term economic stability in similar settings.
Cash Is Queen: Local Economy Effects of Cash Transfers to Women in West Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-06) Papineni, Sreelakshmi; Gonzalez, Paula; Goldstein, Markus; Friedman, Jed
This paper examines the direct and spillover effects of cash transfers paid in a rural and low-income setting. In the short run, an unconditional cash transfer program for ultra-poor households in Northern Nigeria led to a 12 percentage point increase in micro-enterprise formation for program recipients. Moreover, benefits continued to increase in magnitude after program cessation and also extended to nearby non-beneficiary households when compared to counterparts in other villages where no cash transfers were paid. One year after program cessation, beneficiary women increased their enterprise ownership rate by 20 percentage points, while the rate for non-beneficiary women increased by 13 percentage points. Both groups of households enjoyed higher consumption and food security, and shifted away from husband-centered toward joint intrahousehold decision-making. One mechanism for this growth spillover is a boost to aggregate demand for local goods, in part identified by the positive link between the (randomly determined) neighborhood density of cash transfer households and enterprise creation. The increase in local female entrepreneurial activity translates to a partial income multiplier of at least 0.32. Women face restrictive social norms around work in this context and the slack productive resource brought into activity by the cash transfer is female labor, specifically female-led entrepreneurship near the home.
Mitigating the Impact of Household Expropriation on Female Entrepreneurship: Experimental Evidence from Ghana
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-02) Campos, Francisco; Conconi, Adriana; Davies, Elwyn; Gassier, Marine; Goldstein, Markus
How do intrahousehold dynamics affect the investment of female entrepreneurs? This paper presents findings from a randomized controlled trial in Ghana that assesses the impacts of four alternative support mechanisms on women-owned businesses: (a) an unconditional grant provided through a mobile money account equivalent to two months of median profits, (b) an unconditional grant disbursed to the female entrepreneurs’ spouses in similar conditions; (c) a grant conditional on participating with their spouses in a training on joint decision-making; and (d) a grant conditional on reaching a savings goal under a dedicated bank account. In line with Fafchamps et al. (2014), the study finds no impacts of the unconditional grants on the business performance of female entrepreneurs. The disbursement to the spouse also has no impact on the sales, profits, or investment of female entrepreneurs. Although there is no evidence that the allocation of resources within households is efficient, the joint decision-making intervention leads to increased household support for the women’s businesses but does not impact business performance. The savings support mechanism leads to a 15 percent increase in sales and a 10 percent increase in profits. These effects are largest among female entrepreneurs who faced high expropriation pressure at baseline. This subgroup obtains a 29 percent increase in sales and a 23 percent increase in profits. The paper tests for alternative mechanisms, including self-control issues, liquidity constraints, and access to savings, but these do not explain the results. The findings substantiate that intrahousehold dynamics matter for women’s investment decisions, and highlight the importance of promoting autonomy in the face of expropriation pressures, for increased growth and investment.
Do Factory Jobs Improve Welfare? Experimental Evidence from Ethiopia
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2025-02-12) Abebe, Girum; Buehren, Niklas; Goldstein, Markus
This study explores the impact of a light-touch job-facilitation intervention that supported young female job seekers during the application process for factory work in a newly constructed industrial park in Ethiopia. Using data from a panel of 687 job seekers and randomized access to the support intervention, the study finds that treated applicants are more likely to be employed and have higher earnings and savings eight months after baseline, although these impacts are short-lived. Four years later, the effects on employment and income largely dissipated. The results suggest that young women face significant barriers to engaging in factory work in the short run that a simple job-facilitation intervention can help overcome. In the long term, however, these jobs do not offer a better alternative than other income-generating opportunities.
Breadwinners and Caregivers: Examining the Global Relationship between Gender Norms and Economic Behavior
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-02-01) Gonzalez Martinez, Paula Lorena; Kilic, Talip; Papineni, Sreelakshmi; Wollburg, Philip Randolph; Goldstein, Markus
Gender norms are often emphasized to help explain gender gaps in the labor market. This paper examines global patterns of gender attitudes and norms toward the stereotypical gender roles of the male breadwinner and female caregiver, and broad support for gender equality in opportunities, and studies their relationship with economic behavior. Using data collected via Facebook from 150,000 individuals across 111 countries the paper explores how gender beliefs and norms are related to labor supply, household production, and intrahousehold decision-making power within a country. The paper provides descriptive evidence that the more gender equitable or counter-stereotypical are beliefs and norms, the more likely women are to work, the more time men spend on household chores, and the higher the likelihood of joint decision-making among couples. The findings suggest an underestimation of the support for gender equality globally and the extent of underestimation varies by gender and region. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential entry points for policy to help address gender norms.
Shifting Spousal Decision-Making Patterns: Whom You Target in an Agricultural Intervention Matters
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-12-20) Bedi, Tara; Buehren, Niklas; Goldstein, Markus; Ketema, Tgist
Does it matter whether poverty reduction programs target the female or male spouse? A randomized controllled trial in Ethiopia is used to study the differential impacts of easing information and financial constraints on agricultural productivity and household welfare, using data from 1,214 households in two regions of Ethiopia. The program targeted the husband, the wife, or both in a married household. The results indicate that the targeted spouse determines the type and channel of impacts. Targeting both spouses increased agricultural productivity in the short run and the monetary value of small ruminants and poultry in the long run, with a marginal positive impact on nonfood expenditure. Targeting only the female spouse resulted in increased business income from businesses with female involvement. This consequently increased household use of formal savings devices. This is in line with female preferences outside agriculture and for off-farm activities, and it results in little impact on agricultural productivity, despite an increase in women’s access to extension services. Targeting only the male spouse has no impact on household savings or expenditure even though it increases men’s wage income. The results suggest that the sharing of knowledge about the intervention changed household decisions. This would explain the different outcomes when both spouses were targeted, rather than only one.
Evening the Credit Score? Impact of Psychometric Loan Appraisal for Women Entrepreneurs
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11) Alibhai, Salman; Cassidy, Rachel; Goldstein, Markus; Papineni, Sreelakshmi
Women’s lower rates of ownership of collateralizable assets are a constraint to accessing larger business loans. This paper tests the impact of using psychometric credit scoring as a substitute for collateral for loans up to US$7,500, via a randomized controlled trial with a microfinance institution in Ethiopia. The paper finds positive impacts on women’s access to credit, and survival of their firms during the COVID-19 pandemic and conflict. Firms that remained operational were profitable; but there is limited evidence of impact on firm growth under these circumstances. The study showcases the potential for using innovative technologies to extend entrepreneurial finance to underserved markets.
Two Heads are Better Than One: Agricultural Production and Investment in Côte d’Ivoire
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-05) Donald, Aletheia; Goldstein, Markus; Rouanet, Léa
Increasing agricultural productivity and investment is critical to reducing poverty, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture remains the dominant income-generating activity. One potential way to promote investment and improve the efficiency of household farm production is to empower women as co-managers and facilitate the coordination of production decisions within the family. The authors test this approach in Côte d’Ivoire through a couples training delivered to rubber producers, and find that including women in economic planning improved the efficiency of household farm production and promoted higher levels of investment.
Legacies of Conflict: Experiences, Self-efficacy and the Formation of Conditional Trust
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11) Buehren, Niklas; Goldstein, Markus; Rasul, Imran; Smurra, Andrea
An established literature finds that those exposed to conflict are more pro-social later in life. This paper builds on this work in two directions using a sample of 4,200 women born during the Sierra Leonean civil war and surveyed 14 years later. First, the paper introduces the notion of conditional trust, whereby individuals neither outright distrust nor outright trust others, but can use their perceived self-efficacy to raise the cooperativeness of others. This takes ideas from the psychology literature documenting survivors of trauma can go through a process of posttraumatic growth generating perceived self-efficacy. The paper develops a framework to make precise how conditional trust depends on beliefs over others, gains from cooperation, risk aversion, and the key mediating role of self-efficacy in linking conflict and trust. Second, the paper constructs a granular typology of experiences of conflict combining information on a geo-coded measure of exposure to conflict, self-reported memories/recall of victimization, and ages of exposure to conflict. This distinguishes individuals who are traumatized, those with direct first-hand accounts of conflict, and those with second-hand narratives. Empirically, the analysis shows that exposure to conflict—either by being in the vicinity of conflict or through specific experiences of conflict—leads respondents to be significantly more likely to conditionally trust others. The findings show that perceived self-efficacy is higher among those exposed to conflict and this mediates the impact of conflict on trust preferences. By considering the role of memories, narratives/socialization in shaping experiences of conflict, generating self-efficacy and thus driving trust preferences, the paper provides new avenues for research on how psychological legacies of trauma early in life shape the long run formation of economic preferences.
Childcare, COVID-19 and Female Firm Exit: Impact of COVID-19 School Closure Policies on Global Gender Gaps in Business Outcomes
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-04) Gonzalez, Paula; Goldstein, Markus; Papineni, Sreelakshmi; Wimpey, Joshua
This paper estimates the impact of a large negative childcare shock on gender gaps in entrepreneurship using the shock created by national COVID-19 school closure policies. The paper leverages a unique data set of monthly enterprise data collected from a repeated cross-section of business owners across 50 countries via Facebook throughout 2020 and in 2021. The paper shows that, globally, female-led firms were, on average, 4 percentage points more likely to close their business and experienced larger revenue declines than male-led firms during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 (male firms closed at a rate of 17 percent in 2020, and 12 percent in 2021). The gender gap in firm closures persisted into 2021. The closing of schools, a key part of the care infrastructure, led to higher business closures, and women with children were more likely to close their business in response to a school closure policy than men with children. Female entrepreneurs were found to take on a greater share of the increase in the domestic and care work burden than male entrepreneurs. Finally, the paper finds that women entrepreneurs in societies with more conservative norms with respect to gender equality were significantly more likely to close their business and increase the time spent on domestic and care responsibilities in response to a school closure policy, relative to women in more liberal societies. The paper provides global evidence of a motherhood penalty and childcare constraint to help explain gender inequalities in an entrepreneurship context.