The biggest questions in development economics keep running into the same wall: we don't have good enough data on how people actually work across most of the world. Charles Gottlieb has spent a decade trying to build it.

Topics covered:

• Why the binding constraint in global labor data has shifted from availability to comparability
• Land tenure regimes in sub-Saharan Africa: why "use it or lose it" land rights trap workers in agriculture and slow urbanization
• Why gender gaps in labor force participation don't close with economic growth, and why the drivers are largely non-economic
• How time use data could answer questions that labor force surveys can never reach, including what people do with the hours they stop working
• Why studying the same distortions in isolation keeps the development literature fro ...