There are substantial learning gaps across countries on standardized international assessments.  In this paper, I use unique child-level panel data from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam with identical tests administered across these countries to children at 5, 8, 12 and 15 years of age to ask...

The present study employs recent World Bank data to shed light, in a global context, on the transformation of income and inequality changes to poverty reduction for a large number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).  The study begins by shedding light on SSA's progress on poverty.  Next,...

We introduce a new 'supply-push' instrument for foreign aid, to be used together with an instrumental variable estimator that filters out interactive fixed effects.  We use this instrument to study the effects of aid on macroeconomic ratios, and especially the ratios of consumption, investment,...

We gave US$1,000 cash prizes to winners of a business ideas competition in Africa.  The competition, entitled 'Aspire' is intended to attract young individuals aspiring to become entrepreneurs.  Participants were ranked by panels of judges composed of established entrepreneurs.  Each panel...

Job creation is a central part of the policy of almost all African countries.  The problems are particularly acute in Nigeria where over the period of the early 2000s there was a substantial decline in the number of private wage jobs.  While policy discussion focuses on the extent of...

I develop a unique database of international fossil-fuel subsidies by examining country-specific patterns in carbon emission-to-GDP ratios, known as emission-intensities.  For most but not all countries, intensities tend to be hump-shaped with income.  I construct a model of...

We estimate the impacts of being connected to politicians on occupational choice.  We use an administrative dataset collected in 2008-2010 on 20 million individuals and rely on naming conventions to assess family links to candidates in elections held in 2007 and 2010.  We first estimate the...

This paper examines the impact of the oil price boom in the 1970s and the subsequent bust on non-oil economic activity in oil-department countries.  During the boom, manufacturing value added and exports increased significantly relative to non-oil dependent countries, along with wages,...

Standard models often predict that people should either demand to save or demand to borrow, but not both.  We hypothesise instead that saving and borrowing among microfinance clients are substitutes, satisfying the same underlying demand: for a regular schedule of deposits and a lump-sum...

This paper presents a new adaptive framework for understanding children's growth in the past.  Drawing upon the recent work of Gluckman and Hanson (2006) and their co-authors on adaptive responses in relation to growth, I present three prenatal and three postnatal adaptive mechanisms that...