Mobile money, a service that allows monetary value to be stored on a mobile phone and sent to other users via text messages, has been adopted by the vast majority of Kenyan households. We estimate that access to the Kenyan mobile money system M-PESA increased per capita consumption levels and lifted 194,000 households, or 2% of Kenyan households, out of poverty. The impacts, which are more pron...

Many countries around the world are experiencing a significant shift in demographic patterns towards an older population. The age composition of the labor force has also changed dramatically, often accompanied by sharp reductions in the labor force participation rates of older workers. These phenomena in concert pose numerous challenges for the design of public pension programs and labor market...

In this paper, I review the evolution and characteristics of South Korea’s financial system since the early 1960s. The South Korean experiences are then used to argue that the distribution of the knowledge about valuable businesses varies with the stage of economic development. This has implications for the design of financial system. In the early development stage when low labor cost is the ma...

The Precast Concrete Industry (PCI) is one of the major contributors to the national economy and can be categorised as labor-intensive industry. It is currently experiencing shortcomings in terms of delivery products at a competitive cost and time. This is mainly due to the inefficiencies associate with planning and scheduling of skilled operators within crews configurations. This paper present...

This paper attempts to explain the growth slowdown in Japan as a structural adjustment to the emergence of lower cost producers of manufacture goods. Prior to the 1990s Japan had achieved significant market power and hence profitability in producing various manufacture goods. This profitability led to an allocation of resources towards this sector; indeed, the fraction of resources in the manuf...

The work and retirement decisions of husbands and wives are likely to be made jointly as they allocate their available resources. This article models the allocation of family wealth and family members' time over the lifetime of the unit. The first section reports simulation results that illustrate the relationship between the value of members' time in both market work and the production of home...

We estimate the effects of higher quality healthcare usage on health, labor supply and schooling outcomes for sick individuals in Tanzania. Using exogenous variation in the cost of formal sector healthcare to predict treatment choice, we show that using better quality care improves health outcomes and changes the allocation of time amongst productive activities. In particular, sick adults who r...

Sibling rivalry occurs when siblings compete for parental investments. We examine how rivalry among biological siblings, who may not be co-resident, differs from rivalry among co-resident children and how this affects school enrollment for children in Burkina Faso. We test the hypothesis that the value of child labor in home production contributes to rivalry by comparing households that differ ...

This paper explores the e ects of rainwater harvesting (RWH) on aggregate household labor supply in areas prone to droughts. Using a Brazilian survey on rainwater harvesting, we nd that having a RWH infrastructure at the homestead increases household wellbeing through three channels: (i) a direct time allocation e ect since households spend less time fetching water from distant sources, the tim...

Regional integration proposals often require agreements between countries that differ in geographic size, resource endowments, transportation assets, technologies, and product quality. In this asymmetric setting, questions arise about the potential for mutual gains and the distribution of benefits among industries and workers in each country. This paper examines how regional integration between...