This article examines the determinants of human and physical capital at marriage. Using detailed data from rural Ethiopia, the authors find that assets brought to marriage are distributed in a highly unequal manner. For first unions, assets brought to marriage are positively associated with...

This article analyzes the determinants of earnings differentials among enterprises of different ownership in urban China in 1995, using an extended version of Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition methods. We find strong evidence of a nonintegrated multitiered labor market in China, pure...

In this article, I provide an empirical account of the human capital investment behavior of parents in the face of endowment differences among siblings. The data set used contains a three-wave panel of 4,030 individuals. The article presents a rare case in which endowments are measured...

The World Bank recently began publishing estimates of countries' "genuine savings": a comprehensive measure of net investment across all forms of capital (natural and human as well as produced). This article presents the first empirical investigation of the consistency of the Bank's estimates...

Drawing on recently completed firm-level surveys in Bangladesh, China, India, and Pakistan, this article investigates the relationship between the investment climate and firm performance. These standardized surveys of large, random samples of firms in common sectors reveal that objective...

The temporary participation in the labor force of wives whose husbands have become unemployed has been referred to in the literature as the "added worker effect" (AWE). Previous research conducted using data from the United States has found only a small AWE, a result that accords with life cycle...

This article uses a multiple-stage Theil decomposition to examine the contribution of five development processes to wage inequality in Taiwan: increases in educational attainment, the expansion of skill-intensive industries, factor-specific technical change, population aging, and the entry of...

A new antipoverty program in Mexico, PROGRESA, provides monetary transfers to families that are contingent upon their children's regular attendance at school. The benefit levels vary with the grade level and gender of the child and are intended to offset the opportunity costs of not sending...