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We conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the empirical literature on the impact of gender inequality in education on per capita economic growth, including crosscountry , time series, and sub-national growth regressions. Studies using male and female education as separate covariates show a larger effect of female than male education on growth, except when an arguably problematic regression specification popularized by Barro and co-authors is used. We conduct a meta-regression analysis for studies that use the female-male ratio of education as explanatory variable. There we find evidence for a positive and statistically significant relationship between gender equality in education and growth based on 216 estimates from 17 such studies. We find that the average partial correlation coefficient between economic growth and the ratio of female over male education is 0.25, which is a moderate effect. The effect does not appear to be influenced by publication bias, it increases when one controls for initial education levels and social/institutional controls, while it falls with the use of fixed effects, the inclusion of economic controls, and the share of female authors. 1 Acknowledgements: We thank Hugh Waddington, Chris Doucouliagos, participants at workshops and conferences in Delhi, Göttingen, IAFFE conference in Seoul, Development Economics and Policy Conference in Zurich for helpful comments and suggestions. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) initiative, a multi-funder partnership between the UK's Department for International Development, the Hewlett Foundation and the International Development Research Centre.

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Lack of skills is arguably one of the most important determinants of high levels of unemployment and poverty. In response, policymakers often initiate vocational training programs in effort to enhance skill formation among the youth. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we examine a large youth training intervention in Nepal. We find, twelve months after the start of the training program, that the intervention generated an increase in non-farm employment of 10 percentage points (ITT estimates) and up to 31 percentage points for program compliers (LATE estimates). We also detect sizeable gains in monthly earnings. Women who start selfemployment activities inside their homes largely drive these impacts. We argue that low baseline educational levels and non-farm employment levels and Nepal's social and cultural norms towards women drive our large program impacts. Our results suggest that the program enables otherwise underemployed women to earn an income while staying at homeclose to household errands and in line with the socio-cultural norms that prevent them from taking up employment outside the house.

Many rural Thai households spend significant shares of their annual expenditure on lottery tickets while having poor knowledge about the properties of the game and upwardly biased prospects of winning the jackpot. By randomly informing households on the actual probability distribution of the Thai Government Lottery we test whether improved knowledge reduces lottery participation. Our intervention exogenously induces more precise perceptions of the lottery's odds in the treatment group. We show, however, that the willingness to pay for lottery tickets is not affected by that.