A standard view in the migration literature is that of a fixed family sending off a migrant who may leave his or her spouse and children behind. We show empirically that changing marital status after migration is widespread for migrants moving from developing countries to the United States, so that the family unit itself changes with migration. Only one-third of ever-married adult migrants are currently married to a spouse they wed before migration. The variance of spousal characteristics is higher for migrants than nonmigrants. Using a survey experiment with young unmarried Mexican men, we find that they have more uncertainty about the characteristics of their future spouses should they migrate than if they were to stay at home, and that priming them to think about marriage reduces their expressed likelihood of migrating. We draw out implications of these counterfactual spouses for empirical research on migration decisions and effects and for migration policy.

Youth often decide what to study with limited exposure to many high-paying careers. In-person visits from role models can change behaviour but are difficult to scale and typically expose youth to only one person in one career. We test the impact of exposing youth to multiple role models, in both science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and entrepreneurship careers, using online video interviews to intervene at large scale in a randomized trial with 29,243 students in 813 Ecuadorian high schools. Girls treated with multiple role models reduce their likelihood of choosing a STEM major, increasing enrolment in business majors instead. Boys also shift their major choice away from STEM and move towards other majors such as agriculture. The contrast between fields appears to shift youth away from what they see as the more challenging career and reinforces girls' stereotypical college major choice.

How does emigration of highly educated citizens of low-income countries to high-income countries affect the economies of the origin countries? The direct effect is “brain drain”—a decrease in the country’s human capital stock. However, there may also be indirect “brain gain” effects. This review summarizes evidence that uses causal inference methods to reveal mechanisms that may lead to brain drain, gain, or circulation. Collectively, the weight of the evidence suggests that migration opportunities often increase human capital stock in origin countries and produce downstream beneficial effects through remittances; foreign direct investment and trade linkages; transfers of knowledge, technology and norms; and return migration. We discuss conditions under which benefits from skilled migration may outweigh costs and also describe potential research paths to inform policy.

Policymakers often test expensive new programs on relatively small samples. Formally incorporating informative Bayesian priors into impact evaluation offers the promise to learn more from these experiments. We evaluate a Colombian program for 200 firms which aimed to increase exporting. Priors were elicited from academics, policymakers, and firms. Contrary to these priors, frequentist estimation cannot reject null effects in 2019, and finds some negative impacts in 2020. For binary outcomes like whether firms export, frequentist estimates are relatively precise, and Bayesian posterior intervals update to overlap almost completely with standard confidence intervals. For outcomes like increasing export variety, where the priors align with the data, the value of these priors is seen in posterior intervals that are considerably narrower than the confidence intervals. Finally, for noisy outcomes like export value, posterior intervals show almost no updating from priors, highlighting how uninformative the data are about such outcomes. Future policy experiments could use these posteriors as priors in a Bayesian or empirical Bayesian analysis.

A randomized experiment in Togo found that personal initiative training for small businesses resulted in large and significant impacts for both men and women after two years. We revisit these entrepreneurs after seven years and find long-lasting average impacts of personal initiative training of $91-higher profits per month, which is larger than the two-year impacts. However, these long-term impacts are very different for men and women: The impact for men grows over time as they accumulate more capital and increase self-efficacy, whereas the impact for women is flat or declines, and capital buildup is much more limited. (JEL J16, J24, L25, L26, M53, O12, O14)

Standard in-person business training programs are costly and difficult to scale to the millions of microenterprises in the developing world. We conduct an experiment to test the feasibility, cost-savings, and impact of delivering live training sessions over Zoom to microentrepreneurs in Mexico and Guatemala. We demonstrate that it is now feasible to both recruit and train self-employed women online, covering a wide geographic area, with few technology issues. However, the cost-savings over in-person classes are less than expected. Training improved business practices and performance over 2 months, but impacts had dissipated within 6 months.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in border closures in many countries and a sharp reduction in overall international mobility. However, this disruption of legal pathways to migration has raised concerns that potential migrants may turn to irregular migration routes as a substitute. We examine how the pandemic has changed intentions to migrate from The Gambia, the country with the highest pre-pandemic per-capita irregular migration rates in Africa. We use a large-scale survey conducted in 2019 and 2020 to ask about changes in intentions to migrate to Europe and to neighbouring Senegal. We find that youth say that the pandemic has reduced the intention to migrate to both destinations, with approximately one-third of young males expressing less intention to migrate. The largest reductions in migration intentions are for individuals who were unsure of their intent pre-pandemic and for poorer individuals who are no longer able to afford the costs of migrating at a time when these costs have increased and their remittance income has fallen. Nevertheless, despite these decreases in intentions, the overall desire to migrate the backway to Europe remains high, highlighting the need for legal migration pathways to support migrants and divert them from the risks of backway migration.

Should governments in developing countries directly support firms with policies such as grants, subsidized loans, and training and consulting programs, or should they instead just aim to enact sensible regulatory and macroeconomic policies and not attempt to engage in industrial policy? While industrial policy has gained renewed attention in developed economies, it faces considerable skepticism in developing countries scarred by previous experiences and facing limited fiscal space. I discuss the rationale for government involvement, and then lessons from a recent research agenda in development economics on how to target these programs, on whether they induce firms to undertake additional activities, on avoiding political capture, and on how these interact with competition. This work shows that these policies can deliver some of their promised benefits, but that there is still much to learn and the need for systematic and serious attempts at prospective impact evaluation as new policies are launched.

Governments around the developing world face pressure to intervene actively to help jobseekers find employment. Two of the most common policies used are job training, based on the idea that many of those seeking jobs lack the skills employers want, and job search assistance, based on the possibility that even if workers have the skills demanded, search and matching frictions make it difficult for workers to be hired in the jobs that need these skills. However, reviews of the first generation of evaluations of these programs found typical impacts to be small, casting doubt on the usefulness and cost-effectiveness of these programs. This paper re-examines the arguments for whether, when, and how, developing country governments should undertake job training and job search assistance policies. We use our experience with policy implementation, and evidence from recent impact evaluations, to argue that there is still a role for governments in using these programs. However, success depends critically on program design and delivery elements that can be difficult to scale effectively, and in many cases the binding constraint may be a lack of firms with job openings, rather than a lack of workers with the skills to fill these openings.

Only one in seven of the world's population have ever migrated, despite the enormous gains in income possible through international and internal movement. I examine the evidence for different explanations given in the economics literature for this lack of movement and their implications for policy. Incorrect information about the gains to migrating, liquidity constraints that prevent poor people paying the costs of moving, and high costs of movement arising from both physical transportation costs and policy barriers all inhibit movement and offer scope for policy efforts to inform, provide credit, and lower moving costs. However, the economics literature has paid less attention to the fears people have when faced with the uncertainty of moving to a new place, and to the reasons behind the tears they shed when moving. While these tears reveal the attachment people have to particular places, this attachment is not fixed, but itself changes with migration experiences. Psychological factors such as a bias toward the status quo and the inability to picture what one is giving up by not migrating can result in people not moving, even when they would benefit from movement and are not constrained by finances or policy barriers from doing so. This suggests new avenues for policy interventions that can help individuals better visualize the opportunity costs of not moving, alleviate their uncertainties, and help shift their default behavior from not migrating.

Migration changes how families form and dissolve, and how one should conceptualize the family. This has implications for thinking about how the migration decision is modelled when individuals are unable to picture the counterfactual families they may have. Differences in marital status can induce two otherwise identical individuals to make different migration decisions. It also has implications for attempts to causally estimate impacts of migration, when the family composition changes with the migration decision itself. This paper shows empirically that changing marital status after migration is widespread, and that the traditional model of a fixed family sending off a migrant who remains part of that same family only describes a minority of migrants moving from developing countries to the U.S. The authors draw out lessons from thinking about counterfactual families for empirical research and for migration policy.

The limited market size of many small emerging economies is a key constraint to the growth of innovative small and medium enterprises. Exporting offers a potential solution, but firms may struggle to locate and appeal to foreign buyers. We conducted a six-country randomized experiment with 225 firms in the Western Balkans to test the effectiveness of 30 h of live groupbased training and 5 h of one-on-one remote consulting in overcoming these constraints. Treated firms used techniques such as search engine optimization and improved Facebook content to increase their digital presence and better reach foreign customers. A year later, we find positive and significant impacts on the number of customers, and a significant intensive margin increase in export sales. Qualitative interviews suggest this improvement came from a combination of sector-specific advice on market expansion, and through an encouragement effect which gave entrepreneurs the confidence to try new sales strategies. & COPY; 2023 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Digital technology offers the potential to lower the costs of delivering business training, and to enable it to be scaled across a wide geographic area. But there are questions about how feasible such training is for entrepreneurs running microenterprises in developing country settings, as well as concerns about high drop-out rates with voluntary online courses. We worked with an NGO, CREA, to test their online training program for female microentrepreneurs in Mexico and Guatemala as these countries recovered from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

No AccessPolicy Research Working Papers22 Feb 2023Bayesian Impact Evaluation with Informative Priors: An Application to a Colombian Management and Export Improvement ProgramAuthors/Editors: Leonardo Iacovone, David McKenzie, Rachael MeagerLeonardo Iacovone, David McKenzie, Rachael Meagerhttps://doi.org/10.1596/1813-9450-10274SectionsAboutPDF (2.9 MB) ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Abstract: Policymakers often test expensive new programs on relatively small samples. Formally incorporating informative Bayesian priors into impact evaluation offers the promise to learn more from these experiments. A Colombian government program which aimed to increase exporting was trialed experimentally on 200 firms with this goal in mind. Priors were elicited from academics, policymakers, and firms. Contrary to these priors, frequentist estimation can not reject 0 effects in 2019, and finds some negative impacts in 2020. For binary outcomes like whether firms export, frequentist estimates are relatively precise, and Bayesian credible posterior intervals update to overlap almost completely with standard confidence intervals. For outcomes like increasing export variety, where the priors align with the data, the value of these priors is seen in posterior intervals that are considerably narrower than frequentist confidence intervals. Finally, for noisy outcomes like export value, posterior intervals show almost no updating from the priors, highlighting how uninformative the data are about such outcomes. Previous bookNext book FiguresreferencesRecommendeddetails View Published: January 2023 Copyright & Permissions Related CountriesColombiaRelated TopicsInternational Economics & TradeMacroeconomics and Economic GrowthPrivate Sector Development KeywordsBAYESIAN IMPACT EVALUATIONPRIOR ELICITATIONRANDOMIZED EXPERIMENTEXPORT COMPETITIVENESSSOCIAL POLICY EVALUATION METHODMANAGEMENT PDF DownloadLoading ...

Governments seek to reduce pervasive firm informality for multiple reasons: taxes, firm growth, rule of law, and information. We conducted a randomized experiment in Malawi to test three alternatives to achieving these goals: a) helping firms obtain a business registration certificate that offers formal market access but imposes no tax obligations; b) helping firms obtain both business and tax registration; and c) supplementing business registration with a bank information session. We find incredibly high demand for obtaining a formal status that is separate from tax obligations, and very low take-up of tax registration. Business registration alone has no impact on formal market access or firm performance. However, combining registration assistance with the bank in-formation session increases firm sales by 20 percent and profits by 15 percent. The results highlight the ad-vantages of separating business and tax registration, but also the need to help firms benefit from their new formal status.