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In South Asia, three quarters of ultra-poor households report casual labour as the dominant form of income. In urban areas, short-term construction jobs are found through social connections or by going to a “labour stand”, essentially an intersection where low-skilled labourers wait each morning for employers looking to hire for a day or two.

This project will study the effects of actual and threatened skills audits on applicants’ skill reporting decisions, applicants’ skill investment decisions, firms’ hiring decisions, and firm-applicant match quality.

This project examines whether political and personal connections, as well as co-ethnicity, co-religiosity and gender, affect access to institutions.

Cash transfer programs continue to be implemented and expanded by governments and non-government organizations in many low-income countries as a tool for poverty alleviation. When implemented at scale, such programs may have important short- and long-run implications for firms. However, there are relatively few opportunities to study how an economy responds to an exogenous shock of such a magnitude, and the response of the private sector is critical in determining how these types of shocks will propagate through the economy.