The lack of reliable development statistics for many poor countries has led the U.N. to call for a “data revolution” (United Nations, 2013).

Across multiple African countries, discrepancies between administrative data and independent household surveys suggest official statistics systematically exaggerate development progress. We provide evidence for two distinct explanations of these discrepancies.

This paper was updated in March 2015.  Developing countries invest in training skilled workers and can lose part of their investment if those workers emigrate. 

More and more countries are recruiting doctors and nurses overseas, unleashing global debates on the proper regulation health worker migration. The World Health Organization (WHO) has advanced a “Global Code of Practice” on health worker recruitment.

We report on a randomized field experiment using price incentives to address both economic and gender inequality in land tenure formalization.

While measured remittances by migrant workers have soared in recent years, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. We review existing explanations for this puzzle and propose three new ones. First, we offer evidence that a large majority of the recent rise in...

Research on migration and development has recently changed, in two ways. First, it has grown sharply in volume, emerging as a proper subfield. Second, while it once embraced principally rural-urban migration and international remittances, migration and development research has broadened to consider ...