The impact of imports from low-wage countries on domestic labor market outcomes has been a hotly debated issue for decades.  The recent surge in imports from China has reignited this debate.  Since the 1980s several developed economies have experienced contemporaneous increases in the volume...

In partial equilibrium a rapidly rising carbon tax encourages oil producers to extract fossil fuels more quickly, giving rise to the Green Paradox. General equilibrium analysis for a closed economy shows that a rapidly rising carbon tax negatively affects the interest rate, which tends to weaken...

Existing theories of pre-emptive war typically predict that the leading country may choose to launch a war on a follower who is catching up, since the follower cannot credibly commit to not use their increased power in the future.  But it was Japan who launched a war against the West in 1941,...

Suppression of the slave trade after 1807 increased the incidence of conflict between Africans.  We use geo-coded data on African conflicts to uncover a discontiuous increase in conflict after 1807 in areas affected by the slave trade.  In West Africa, the slave trade declined.  This...

Women in developing countries are disempowered relative to their contemporaries in developed countries.  High youth unemployment and early marriage and childbearing interact to limit human capital investment and enforce dependence on men.  In this paper we evaluate an attempt to jump-start...

We show that the long-run consequences of historical warfare are different for Sub-Saharan Africa than for the rest of the Old World.  We identify the locations of over 1,750 conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Europe from 1400 to 1799.  We find that historical warfare predicts greater state...

We play a one-shot public good game in rural India between farmers connected to an exogenous star network.  Contributions by the centre of the star reach more players and have a larger impact on aggregate payoffs than contributions by the spoke players.  Yet, we find that the centre player...

The holding of elections has become universal but only about half of all elections have been free and fair.  Electoral malpractice not only distorts the quality of representation but has implications for political, social and economic outcomes.  Existing datasets either provide broad...

We use data from Ethiopia Rural Household Survey and the Ethiopian Central Statistics Agency to demonstrate a set of techniques for estimating optimal investment allocation in smallholder farming.  The approaches treat farming tasks, constraints, and investments as a portfolio problem,...

We run a novel field experiment to link managers of African manufacturing firms.  The experiment features exogenous link formation, exogenous seeding of information and exogenous assignment to treatment and placebo.  We study the impact of the experiment on firm business practices outside of...