This paper examines the determinants of assets at marriage in rural Ethiopia. We identify and test three separate processes that determine assets brought to marriage: assortative matching; compensating parental transfers at marriage; and strategic behavior by parents. We find ample evidence for...

Inflation is a far from homogeneous phenomenon, but this fact is ignored in most work on consumer price inflation. Using a novel methodology grounded in theory, the ten sub-components of the consumer price index (excluding mortgage interest rates, or CPIX) for South Africa are modeled separately...

The contribution of new technology to economic growth can only be realized when and if the new technology is widely diffused and used. Diffusion itself results from a series of individual decisions to begin using the new technology, decisions which are often the result of a comparison of the...

Using matched employer-employee data on 10 African countries, this paper examines the relationship beween wages, worker supervision, and labor productivity in manufacturing. Wages increase with firm size for both production workers and supervisors. We develop a two-tier model of supervision that...

The last quarter of the twentieth century has seen vast change in the transport sectors of many countries, imposing much dislocation on both people and companies engaged in the provision of transport services. Some of the problems have resulted from macroeconomic instabilities like the Asian...

In this paper we argue that Indian water-dispute settlement mechanisms are ambiguous and opaque. We distinguish analytically between situations where cooperation is possible, and situations of pure conflict, where the initial allocation of rights is at stake. In the latter case, a search for a...

Usage of health facilities in Ethiopia is among the lowest in the world; raising usage rates is probably critical for improving health outcomes. The government has diagnosed the principal problem as the lack of primary health facilities and is devoting a large share of the health budget to...

The role of water has featured prominently in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiation process, and in Arab-Israeli disputes in general. The allocation or reallocation of water rights is a particularly thorny problem. Recent work (Fisher, 1995) seeks to sidestep the issue of rights allocation by...

Using original survey data, we document the activities, resources, and governance structure of NGOs operating in Uganda. The NGO sector is funded primarily by international non-governmental organizations and bilateral donors. We find large differences in size and funding across NGOs, with only a...

The reliability of the household consumption based (Engel curve) methodology in detecting gender bias has been called into question because it has generally failed to confirm bias even where it exists. This paper seeks to find explanations for this failure by exploiting a dataset that has...