This working paper synthesizes the theoretical and empirical literature on the use of cash transfers in response to food crisis situations, with particular attention to their use in situations that are exacerbated by volatile, often inflationary, commodity prices. The paper is designed for...

This paper aims to develop and test methods for spatial mapping of population, food production, consumption, and marketed quantities in Africa. As an initial, exploratory exercise, the paper examines the spatial pattern of population, food production, consumption, and trade in the three...

Decades of research have led to substantially improved understanding of the nature of food insecurity. Until the food crisis of 2007/08, a combination of economic growth and targeted programs resulted in a steady fall in the percentage of the world’s population suffering from under-nutrition...

Illegal immigration has been the focus of much debate in receiving countries, but little is known about what drives individual attitudes towards illegal immigrants. To study this question, we use the CCES survey, which was carried out in 2006 in the United States. We find evidence that - in...

This paper studies the e¤ects of service o¤shoring on the level and skill composition of domestic employment, using a rich data set of Italian …rms and propensity score matching techniques. The results show that service o¤shoring has no e¤ect on the level of employment but changes its...

The world food and financial crises threaten to undermine the real incomes of urban consumers in eastern and southern Africa. This study investigates patterns in staple food prices, wage rates, and marketing margins for urban consumers in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia between 1993 and...

There is a large literature pointing to community participation and social networks as salient components of household well-being in developing settings. Yet, there are few insights into whether people mobility affects incentive problems associated with social networks, or whether labor...

This paper tests various hypotheses about distributive politics by studying the distribution of federal spending across U.S. states over the period 1978-2002. We improve on previous work by using survey data to measure the share of voters in each state that are Democrats, Republicans, and...

This paper puts forth a unified theory of growth that captures a number of relevant features of countries transitions from stagnant, predominantly rural economies to vibrant, industrialized economies that have been overlooked by the literature. In our theory, increasing variety of consumer goods...

We analyze empirically the effects of urban agglomeration on Italian college graduates’ work possibilities as entrepreneurs three years after graduation. We find that each 100,000 inhabitant-increase in the size of the individual’s province of work reduces the chances of being an...