Substandard teaching is believed to be the foremost reason for poor quality schooling in the developing world.  This paper uses unique data from primary schools in the state of Punjab in Pakistan to delve into the issues that may determine what makes one teacher more effective than another. ...

Expansion in mobile phone coverage has improved access to information throughout the developing world, particularly within sub-Saharan Africa.  The existing evidence suggests that information technology has improved market efficiency and reduced consumer prices for certain commodities.  There...

This paper studies the distributional impact of commodity price shocks over both the short and very long run.  Using a GARCH model, we find that Australia experienced more volatility than many commodity exporting developing countries over the periods 1865-1940 and 1960-2007.  A single equation...

We quantify the extent to which public-sector employment crowds out private-sector employment using specially assembled datasets for a large cross-sector of developing and advanced countries.  Regressions of either private-sector employment rates or unemployment rates on two measures of...

This chapter takes stock of the current state of banking systems across Sub-Saharan Africa and discusses recent developments including innovations that might help Africa leapfrog more traditional banking models.  Using an array of different data, we document that African banking systems are...

We study the impact of growth and growth accelerations on poverty and inequality in Indonesia using a new panel dataset covering 26 provinces over the period 1977-2010.  This new dataset allows us to distinguish between mining and non-mining sectors of the economy.  We find that growth in...

This paper examines the trade and trade-induced welfare effects of high oil prices. Using a gravity model of trade we find that the distance elasticity of trade signif- icantly increases with the oil price. This suggests that high oil prices make trade less global. We estimate that an increase...

A classroom model of global warming, fossil fuel depletion and the optimal carbon tax is formulated and calibrated. It features iso-elastic fossil fuel demand, stock-dependent fossil fuel extraction costs, an exogenous interest rate and no decay of the atmospheric stock of carbon. The optimal...

Abstract: We consider empirical measurement of exact equivalent/compensating variation resulting from price-change of a discrete good, using individual-level data. We show that for binary and multinomial choice, the marginal distributions of EV/CV are nonparametrically point-identified solely...

This paper shows that Zipf's Law for cities can emerge as a property of a clustering process.  If initially uniformly distributed people chose their location based on a specific gravity equation as found in trade studies, they will form cities that follow Zipf's Law in expected value.  This...