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David McKenzie
David McKenzie is a Lead Economist in the World Bank’s Development Research Group. He received his B.Com.(Hons)/B.A. from the University of Auckland, New Zealand and his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University. Prior to joining the World Bank, he spent four years as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Stanford University.
His work on migration includes evaluating the development impacts of permanent and seasonal worker programmes in the Pacific, financial education programmes for migrants, work on Mexican migrant self-selection, efforts to facilitate migration in the Philippines, and methodological work on sampling and surveying migrants. He has published more than 100 articles and is currently on the editorial boards of the Journal of Development Economics, the World Bank Economic Review, and Migration Studies. He is also a co-founder and regular contributor to the Development Impact blog.
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Assessing the effectiveness of active labour market programmes in developing countries
Job growth is a key policy concern across developing countries and there are been an increased interest in the role of active labour market programmes that provide vocational training to job-seekers, wage subsidies to employers, or search and matching assistance. In this article, David Mckenzie critically evaluates recent studies on these programmes, and finds that the effect on employment and wages is limited.
Making good management stick: Evidence from India
A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this, researchers ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms.
Cash transfers and adult labour outcomes in developing countries
The basic economic model of labour supply predicts that when an adult receives an unexpected cash windfall they should work less and earn less. This underlies concerns that cash transfers will undermine work ethics and make recipients lazy. In this post, Baird et al. discuss how missing markets, price effects, and dynamic and general equilibrium effects can make this intuition misleading in low- and middle-income countries.