This paper revisits the measurement and drivers of intergenerational mobility in education and occupation across eight West African countries, using nationally representative and harmonized microdata from the Enquête Harmonisée sur les Conditions de Vie des Ménages (EHCVM). A key innovation is the inclusion of both co-resident and non-co-resident adult children, addressing a pervasive source of sample selection bias in prior mobility estimates in West Africa. I document intergenerational educational and occupational mobility bias by comparing estimates based on co-resident and full samples. The results reveal strong upward mobility in education and occupation but also show that co-residence introduces a substantial upward bias, educational mobility rates are overstated by 11.5 percentage points (47.2% vs. 35.7%) and occupational mobility by 4.2 percentage points (36.9% vs. 32.7%) when only co-resident individuals are used. Co-resident individuals are younger (mean age 23 vs. 30), more educated (6.0 vs. 4.5 years of schooling), and more likely to be upwardly mobile, leading to inflated mobility estimates. The bias is heterogeneous across gender and space: it tends to inflate mobility for sons, is larger and reversed for daughters, and is strongest among urban sons and rural daughters. Using variation in regional exposure among movers, I find that early-life exposure to high-mobility regions increases educational mobility for boys and occupational mobility for girls, with effects concentrated at ages 6–11 for boys and 0–5 for girls. Finally, exploiting the abolition of primary school fees in Niger and Mali, I show that the reform led to a decline of about 0.8 years in schooling and a 5–9 percentage-point reduction in upward occupational mobility, particularly in rural areas for boy, suggesting that the expansion in access reduced education quality and long-run mobility outcomes.
Gender gaps in business performance remain a persistent challenge in many developing economies. A key policy question is whether competition in experimental settings can enhance female entrepreneurs’ business outcomes relative to their male counterparts. This paper evaluates the impact of the YouWiN! Business Plan Competition in Nigeria, a large-scale program launched in 2011 that awarded approximately USD 34 million in grants to support young entrepreneurs. Using randomized assignment of grants to winners and tracking outcomes over five years, I find that competitive allocation of grants led to substantial improvements in firm performance, with particularly strong effects for female-owned businesses. Female winners experienced higher business entry and survival rates, larger employment gains, and sustained improvements in sales and profits compared to both male winners and the control group. The results persist even during a macroeconomic recession, suggesting that competition can be an effective mechanism for identifying and supporting high-growth female entrepreneurs. This study contributes to the literature on gender and entrepreneurship by demonstrating how competitive business plan programs can reduce gender gaps in firm performance and foster inclusive private-sector growth.
We replicate Horvath (2025), experimentally studying link formation and effort in a linear-quadratic game with positive externalities. Across five treatments, subjects exert 38–97 percent more effort than the Nash benchmark yet create too few links, depressing payoffs. In groups of five, the complete network appears in roughly 25 percent of final rounds (66–76 percent if deviations of ±2 links are allowed); in groups of nine it is almost never reached. Larger groups and lower link costs fail to improve connectivity. Following the original procedures and analysis step-for-step, our replication reproduces the sign, magnitude, and statistical significance of every reported effect. Robustness checks—learning, benefit salience, group benchmarking, alternative clustering, and multiple link-formation specifications—confirm the core pattern: persistent over-provision of effort coupled with under-provision of links, generating substantial efficiency losses.
Disrupting Education: Teacher Strikes, Degree Completion, and Labor Market Outcomes in Benin -- First Draft Soon
Impact of students mobility on the academic performance in high school: Evidence from Benin -- First Draft Soon
An Equilibrium Model of the Impact of the EARLY REACH Program in Harris County (with Fan Wang and Yuwei Zhang)
Digital Literacy and Opportunity: How Early ICT Training Program Influences Gender Equity in STEM and Employment (with Tanguy Agbokpanzo, Emilien Akotenou, and Hugues Djima)
"Ongoing Evaluation of Harris County’s Early REACH Contracted Slots Child Care Program" (With Coleen Carlson, David J. Francis, Willa Friedman, Elizabeth Gregory, Zachary Hough, Elaine Liu, Fan Wang, Yuwei Zhang), First Annual Report, September 2025, Institute for Research on Women Gender & Sexuality.
"Economic Opportunities and Reducing Youth Violence in Benin" (With Emilien Akotenou, Ian Heffernan, Yannick Ngongang, Yabo Gwladys Vidogbena, Leonard Wantchekon, and Songbian Zimé) , Third Semester Report, Project N° 109006, July 2020, IREEP.