| South Asia has been experiencing robust economic growth of about 6% over the last decade. However, it is also the home to about 44% of the world's poor. About 571 million people of the region live under ;The first chapter studies the long-term effects of Bangladesh's female secondary school stipend program on both educational outcomes and economic empowerment of women and finds that the program can be associated with an increase in education level completed by at least 0.21 years, labor force participation by 2 percentage points and with an increase in the likelihood of women working in the formal sector by 3 percentage points. Female wages also increased, reflecting increased productivity. The second chapter finds that migrants from Bangladesh go to the country where they earn the most and the relative stock of more-educated Bangladeshi migrants is higher in the destination where the earnings difference between the skilled and the unskilled workers is higher. The third chapter builds a three sector model of the Indian labor market, calibrates it using pre-MNREGA data and finds that providing manual employment for a fixed number of days like the MNREGA in India can improve welfare for the unskilled but may have adverse effect on the formal sector and skilled workers.;Index words: female secondary stipend program, employment program, migration, sorting, selection, informal, cash-transfer, labor markets. |
