David Mckenzie
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 221807 |
|---|---|
| NOME | David Mckenzie |
| PRENOMES | David |
| SOBRENOME | Mckenzie |
| ASSINATURA | MCKENZIE D |
| AFILIAÇÕES | World Bank |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1885-2426 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 118 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 974 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 118 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1980 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 17 |
Where and how is money spent on international migration and refugees in World Bank operational projects?
Migration, marriage, and counterfactual spouses
A standard view in the migration literature is that of a fixed family sending off a migrant who may leave their spouse and children behind. We show empirically that changing marital status after migration is widespread for migrants moving from developing countries to the U.S., 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 varian…
Job Training and Job Search Assistance Policies in Developing Countries
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 sk…
How should the government bring small firms into the formal system? Experimental evidence from Malawi
Can information and alternatives to irregular migration reduce “backway” migration from The Gambia
Training microentrepreneurs over Zoom
Foreword by the Guest Editors
Estimating the Demand for Business Training
Business-training programs are typically offered for free. Charging a price for training provides potential benefits such as financial sustainability, but little is known about how price affects demand. We conducted two experiments in Jamaica using the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism and take-it-or-leave-it offers to estimate the demand for training. Most entrepreneurs have positive willingness to pay for training, but demand falls sharpl…
Fears and Tears
Only one in seven of the world’s population has ever migrated, despite the enormous gains in income possible through international and internal movement. This paper examines 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…
Field and Natural Experiments in Migration
Many research and policy questions surrounding migration are causal questions. What causes people to migrate What are the consequences of migration for the migrants, their families, and their communities Answering these questions requires dealing with the self-selection inherent in migration choices. Field and natural experiments offer methodological approaches that enable answering these causal questions. This paper discusses the key conceptual …
Can Information and Alternatives to Irregular Migration Reduce “Backway” Migration from the Gambia
Irregular migration from West Africa to Europe across the Sahara and Mediterranean is extremely risky for migrants and a key policy concern. A cluster-randomized experiment with 3,641 young men from 391 settlements in The Gambia is used to test three approaches to reducing risky migration: providing better information and testimonials about the risks of the journey, facilitating migration to a safer destination by providing information and assist…
Covid-19 and Changes in Intentions to Migrate from The Gambia
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 Afri…
Aspirations and financial decisions
Shortening Supply Chains
Fruit and vegetable vendors in Bogota travel most days to a central market to purchase produce, incurring substantial costs. A social enterprise attempted to shorten the supply chain by aggregating orders from many small stores and delivering orders directly from farmers to vendors. We randomized the introduction of this service at the market-block level. Initial interest was high, and the service reduced travel time and costs and increased work-…
How has Covid-19 Affected the Intention to Migrate via the Backway to Europe and to a Neighboring African Country?
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. This paper examines how the pandemic has changed intentions to migrate from The Gambia, the country with the highest pre-pandemic per-capita irregular migration rate…
Can Government Intervention Make Firms More Investment Ready? A Randomized Experiment in the Western Balkans
Innovative firms with good ideas may still struggle to fine-tune them to the stage where they can attract outside funding. We conduct a five-country randomized experiment that tests the impact of an investment readiness program. Firms then pitched their ideas to independent judges. The program resulted in a 0.3 standard deviation increase in the investment readiness score. Two years later, the average impacts on firm investment outcomes are posit…
Self-employment and migration
Improving Business Practices and the Boundary of the Entrepreneur
Many small firms lack the finance and \n marketing skills needed for firm growth. The standard \n approach in many business support programs is to attempt to \n train the entrepreneur to develop these skills, through \n classroom-based training or personalized consulting. \n However, rather than requiring the entrepreneur to be a \n jack-of-all-trades, an alternative is to move beyond the \n boundary of the entrepreneur and link firms to these sk…
Remote-learning, time-use, and mental health of Ecuadorian high-school students during the Covid-19 quarantine
Self-Employment and Migration
There is a widespread policy view that a lack of job opportunities at home is a key reason for migration, accompanied by suggestions of the need to spend more on creating these opportunities to reduce migration. Self-employment is widespread in poor countries, and faced with a lack of existing jobs, providing more opportunities for people to start businesses is a key policy option. But empirical evidence to support this idea is slight, and econom…
Small Firm Death in Developing Countries
We collate sixteen panel surveys from twelve developing countries to develop stylized facts from over 14,000 firms on how much firm death there is, which types of these firms are most likely to die, and why they die. Small firms die at an average rate of 8.2% per year. Death rates are higher in richer countries, for younger firms and less profitable firms, and for firms run by youth. We also find that firm death need not mean permanent exit from …
If it needs a power calculation, does it matter for poverty reduction
Reprint of
The Long-term Impacts of International Migration
We examine the long-term impacts of international migration by comparing immigrants who had successful ballot entries in a migration lottery program, and first moved almost a decade ago, with people who had unsuccessful entries into those same ballots. The long-term gain in income is found to be similar in magnitude to the gain in the first year despite migrants upgrading their education and changing their locations and occupations. This results …
Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals? Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs About Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status
A survey of participants in a large-scale business plan competition experiment, in which winners received an average of U.S. $50,000 each, is used to elicit ex-post beliefs about what the outcomes would have been in the alternative treatment status. Participants are asked the percent chance they would be operating a firm, and the number of employees and monthly sales they would have, had their treatment status been reversed. The study finds the c…
Network effects and the dynamics of migration and inequality
Beyond baseline and follow-up
Can migration reduce educational attainment? Evidence from Mexico
Measuring inequality with asset indicators
The microeconomic determinants of emigration and return migration of the best and brightest
Mental health and poverty in developing countries
Microenterprise growth and the flypaper effect
The Economic Consequences of ‘Brain Drain’ of the Best and Brightest
Brain drain has long been a common concern for migrant-sending countries, particularly for small countries where high-skilled emigration rates are highest. However, while economic theory suggests a number of possible benefits, in addition to costs, from skilled emigration, the evidence base on many of these is very limited. Moreover, the lessons from case studies of benefits to China and India from skilled emigration may not be relevant to much s…
Miserable Migrants? Natural Experiment Evidence on International Migration and Objective and Subjective Well-Being
A land of milk and honey with streets paved with gold
Business training and female enterprise start-up, growth, and dynamics
Does it pay firms to register for taxes? The impact of formality on firm profitability
Enterprise Recovery Following Natural Disasters
Journal Article Enterprise Recovery Following Natural Disasters Get access Suresh De Mel, Suresh De Mel University of Peradeniya Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar David McKenzie, David McKenzie World Bank Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Christopher Woodruff Christopher Woodruff University of Warwick Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scho…
Why Don't Remittances Appear to Affect Growth
While measured remittances by migrant workers have recently soared, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. We propose three new explanations for this puzzle. First, a large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances may be illusory – arising from changes in measurement. Second, cross‐country regressions may lack power to detect such growth effects. Third, remittances rise primarily with rising em…
The Impact of Vocational Training for the Unemployed
We use a randomised experiment to evaluate Turkey’s vocational training programmes for the unemployed. A detailed follow‐up survey of a large sample with low attrition enables precise estimation of treatment impacts and their heterogeneity. The average impact of training on employment is positive but close to zero and statistically insignificant, which is much lower than programme officials and applicants expected. Over the first year, training h…
The effects of cash transfers on adult labor market outcomes
ᅟThe basic economic model of labor supply has a very clear prediction of what we should expect when an adult receives an unexpected cash windfall: they should work less and earn less. This intuition underlies concerns that many types of cash transfers, ranging from government benefits to migrant remittances, will undermine work ethics and make recipients lazy. We discuss a range of additional channels to this simple labor-leisure trade-off that c…
Do Poverty Traps Exist? Assessing the Evidence
A "poverty trap" can be understood as a set of self-reinforcing mechanisms whereby countries start poor and remain poor: poverty begets poverty, so that current poverty is itself a direct cause of poverty in the future. The idea of a poverty trap has this striking implication for policy: much poverty is needless, in the sense that a different equilibrium is possible and one-time policy efforts to break the poverty trap may have lasting effects. B…
Using repeated cross-sections to explore movements into and out of poverty
Remote-learning, time-use, and mental health of Ecuadorian high-school students during the Covid-19 quarantine
Eight Questions about Brain Drain
The term "brain drain" dominates popular discourse on high-skilled migration, and for this reason, we use it in this article. However, as Harry Johnson noted, it is a loaded phrase implying serious loss. It is far from clear that such a loss actually occurs in practice; indeed, there is an increasing recognition of the possible benefits that skilled migration can offer both for migrants and for sending countries. This paper builds upon a recent w…
A Profile of the World's Young Developing Country International Migrants
Individual-level census and household survey data are used to present a rich profile of young developing country international migrants around the world. They are found to comprise a large share of the flow of migrants, particularly among migrants to other developing countries, with the age distribution of migrants peaking in the late teens or early twenties. Detailed data are presented on the age and sex composition of migrants, on whether young…
Who you train matters
Paper Walls Are Easier to Tear Down
The minimal impact of a large-scale financial education program in Mexico City
What happens to diet and child health when migration splits households? Evidence from a migration lottery program
Pannenberg on God and Freedom
Reinterpreting the Educational Past
"The Supreme Court, Fundamentalist Logic, and the Term "Religion
Journal Article The Supreme Court, Fundamentalist Logic, and the Term “Religion” Get access David McKenzie David McKenzie currently professor of philosophy and head Department of Religion and Philosophy at Berry College in Rome, Georgia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Church and State, Volume 33, Issue 4, Autumn 1991, Pages 731–746, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/33.4.731 Published: 01 October 1991
No Problem Here’
The paper outlines the result of a one‐year project of action research into the prevalence and nature of racism in two primary schools and the implementation of multi‐cultural and anti‐racist guidelines in Scotland. Two schools are examined with respect to these factors by teachers. The conclusion is that the action research, although not officially supported by funding, except for a small amount from the University of Stirling, is nevertheless i…
Miracles are not immoral
James Keller recently argued that miracles in the sense of divine intervention are immoral because in such acts God would unfairly choose to help the beneficiary of the miracle over others who may be equally in need and just as deserving. I respond generally by arguing that his analysis overlooks the possibility that those who do not receive the miraculous intervention may receive other benefits of equal or greater value and that there may be pur…
Church, State, and Physician-Assisted Suicide
Journal Article Church, State, and Physician-Assisted Suicide Get access David McKenzie David McKenzie professor of philosophy Berry College, Mount Berry, Georgia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Church and State, Volume 46, Issue 4, Autumn 2004, Pages 787–809, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/46.4.787 Published: 01 October 2004
Poverty Traps And Nonlinear Income Dynamics With Measurement Error And Individual Heterogeneity
Theories of poverty traps stand in sharp contrast to the view that anybody can make it through hardwork and thrift. However, empirical detection of poverty traps is complicated by the lack of long panels, measurement error, and attrition. This paper shows how dynamic pseudo-panel methods can overcome these difficulties, allowing estimation of non-linear income dynamics and testing for the presence of poverty traps. The paper explicitly allows for…
Earnings Mobility And Measurement Error
"The degree of mobility in incomes is often seen as an important measure of the equality of opportunity in a society and of the flexibility and freedom of its labor market. But estimation of mobility using panel data is biased by the presence of measurement error and non-random attrition from the panel. This paper shows that dynamic pseudo-panel methods can be used to consistently estimate measures of absolute and conditional mobility in the pres…
Paper Walls Are Easier To Tear Down
"Increased attention to the development potential of international migration has led to calls for greater global cooperation and for industrial countries to consider temporary worker programs and other options for increasing the number of immigrants admitted. But less attention has been devoted to policies that migrant-sending countries pursue that impact on the ability of people to emigrate under the existing system. This paper documents the exi…
Measuring inequality with asset indicators
A Profile Of The World's Young Developing Country Migrants
Individual level census and household survey data are used to present a rich profile of the young developing migrants around the world. Youth are found to comprise a large share of all migrants, particularly in migration to other developing countries, with the probability of migration peaking in the late teens or early twenties. The paper examines in detail the age and gender composition of migrants, whether or not young migrants move alone or wi…
How Important Is Selection ? Experimental Versus Non-Experimental Measures Of The Income Gains From Migration
Measuring the gain in income from migration is complicated by non-random selection of migrants from the general population, making it difficult to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non-migrants. This paper uses a migrant lottery to overcome this problem, providing an experimental measure of the income gains from migration. New Zealand allows a quota of Tongans to immigrate each year with a lottery to choose among the excess number of appl…
Can Migration Reduce Educational Attainment ? Evidence From Mexico
The authors examine the impact of migration on educational attainment in rural Mexico. Using historical migration rates by state to instrument for current migration, they find evidence of a significant negative effect of migration on schooling attendance and attainment of 12 to 18 year-old boys and 16 to 18 year-old girls. IV-Censored Ordered Probit results show that living in a migrant household lowers the chances of boys completing junior high …
Network effects and the dynamics of migration and inequality
Do Entry Costs Provide an Empirical Basis for Poverty Traps? Evidence from Mexican Microenterprises
Recent theoretical literature in development economics has shown that nonconvex production technologies can result in low‐growth poverty traps. This article uses detailed microenterprise surveys in Mexico to examine the empirical evidence for these nonconvexities at low levels of capital stock. While theory emphasizes nondivisible start‐up costs that exceed the wealth of many potential entrepreneurs, this article shows start‐up costs to be very l…
Poverty traps and nonlinear income dynamics with measurement error and individual heterogeneity
Theories of poverty traps stand in sharp contrast to the view that anybody can make it through hard work and thrift. However, empirical detection of poverty traps is complicated by the lack of long panels, measurement error and attrition. This paper shows how dynamic pseudo-panel methods can overcome these difficulties, allowing estimation of nonlinear income dynamics and testing of the presence of poverty traps. The paper explicitly allows for h…
Migration, remittances, poverty, and human capital
This paper reviews common challenges faced by researchers interested in measuring the impact of migration and remittances on income, poverty, inequality, and human capital (or, in general, "welfare") as well as difficulties confronting development practitioners in converting this research into policy advice. On the analytical side, the paper discusses the proper formulation of a research question, the choice of the analytical tools, as well as th…
Migration And Mental Health
People migrate to improve their well-being. Yet a large literature suggests that migration can be a stressful process, with potentially negative impacts on mental health. However, to truly understand the effect of migration one must compare the mental health of migrants to what their mental health would be had they stayed in their home country. The existing literature is not able to do this. New Zealand allows a quota of Tongans to immigrate each…
A Land Of Milk And Honey With Streets Paved With Gold
Millions of people emigrate every year in search of better economic and social opportunities. Anecdotal evidence suggests that emigrants may have over-optimistic expectations about the incomes they can earn abroad, resulting in excessive migration pressure, and in disappointment among those who do migrate. Yet there is almost no statistical evidence on how accurately these emigrants predict the incomes that they will earn working abroad. In this …
Surveying Migrant Households
Few representative surveys of households of migrants exist, limiting the analysis of the effects of international migration on sending families. This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to compare the performance of three alternative survey methods in collecting data from Japanese-Brazilian families, many of whom send migrants to Japan. The three surveys conducted were 1) Households selected randomly from a door-to-door listing us…
Self-Selection Patterns In Mexico-U.S. Migration
This paper examines the role of migration networks in determining self-selection patterns of Mexico-U.S. migration. We first present a simple theoretical framework showing how such networks impact on migration incentives at different education levels and, consequently, how they are likely to affect the expected skill composition of migration. Using survey data from Mexico, we then show that the probability of migration is increasing with educatio…
Paper Walls Are Easier to Tear Down
Mental health recovery and economic recovery after the tsunami
Earnings Mobility and Measurement Error
The degree of mobility in incomes is often seen as an important measure of the equality of opportunity in a society and of the flexibility and freedom of its labor market. However, estimation of mobility using panel data is biased by the presence of measurement error and nonrandom attrition from the panel. This study shows that dynamic pseudo‐panel methods can be used to consistently estimate measures of absolute and conditional mobility when gen…
Mental health and poverty in developing countries
Economics (87 obras) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (61 obras) · Demographic economics (55 obras) · Economic growth (44 obras) · Geography (42 obras) · Business (38 obras) · Political science (36 obras) · Sociology (31 obras) · Computer Science (26 obras) · Psychology (25 obras)