While use of contract teachers provides a low-cost way to increase teacher numbers, it raises the quality concern that these less trained teachers may be less effective.  We estimate the causal contract-teacher effect on student achievement using school fixed effects and value-added models of...

This paper analyses the factors that give rise to the existence of the informal economy and how it evolves over time.  Using an occupational-choice model the paper shows that at early stages of development, informal and formal markets coexist, but in the long-run the size of the informal...

Reserving in general insurance is often done using chain-ladder-type methods.  We propose a method aimed at situations where there is a sudden change in the economic environment affecting the policies for all accident years in the reserving triangle.  It is shown that methods for forecasting...

We theoretically and empirically examine the relationship between natural resource revenues and financial development.  In the theoretical part, we present a politico-economic model in which contract enforcement is low and decreasing in resource revenues when political institutions are poor,...

Using a complete panel of Ghanaian cocoa producers' societies in the 1930s, we investigate whether group interaction problems threatened (i) capital accumulation, (ii) cocoa sales and (iii) cooperative survival as membership size increased.  We find evidence of group interaction problems.  The...

Previous analyses of the formation and composition of community based organizations (CBOs) have used cross section data.  So, causal inference has been compromised.  We obviate this problem by using data from a quasi-experiment in which villages were formed by government officials selecting...

This study investigates the relationship between parental schooling on the one hand, and child health outcomes (height and weight) and parental health-seeking behaviour (immunisation status of children), on the other.  While establishing a correlational link between parental schooling and child...

Using village data from Tanzania, we test whether gifts and loans between households are voluntary while correcting for mis-reporting by the giving and receiving households.  Two maintained assumptions underlie our analysis: answers to a question on who people would turn to for help are good...

We evaluate automatically selecting the relevant variables in an econometric model from a large candidate set.  General-to-specific selection is outlined for a constant model in orthogonal variables, where only one decision is required to select, irrespective of the number of regressors (N T)...

Using new and unique panel data, we investigate the role of long-term health and childhood malnutrition in schooling outcomes for children in rural India, many of whom lack basic numeracy and literacy skills.  Using data on students' performance on mathematics and Hindi tests, we examine the...