This paper makes a contribution to the study of economic growth in developing countries by analysing the six largest Latin American Economies over 105 years within a two-equation framework. Confirming previous findings, physical and human capital prove to be key determinants of GDP per capita...

We undertake a generalization of the cumulative sum of squares (CUSQ) test to the case of non-stationary autoregressive distributed lag models with quite general deterministic time trends.  The test may be validly implemented with either ordinary least squares residuals or standardized...

What should be the West's top priority for climate-change policy?  This article is a revsied and updated version of my talk to the Potsdam Global Sustainability Symposium (which drafted the "Potsdam Declaration" presented to the 2007 UN Climate Change Conference in Bali).

As formalized by Montgomery (1991), referral by employees improves efficiency if the unobserved quality of a new worker is higher than that of unrefereed workers.  Using data compiled by army archives, we test whether the referral system in use in the British colonial army in Ghana served to...

Political accountability and participation are taken as key ingredients for development.  In this context voter education and informational campaigns are becoming popular with donors.  We followed a large-scale randomized campaign against electoral violence sponsored by an international NGO...

This paper examines migrations'  choice of destination conditional on migration.  To this end, we design an empirical strategy which remedies both migration selection and unobserved heterogeneity problems.  The study uses data from two rounds of Nepal Living Standard Surveys and a Population...

Assortative matching occurs in many social contexts.  We experimentally investigate gender assorting in sub-Saharan villages.  In the experiment, covillagers could form groups to share winnings in a gamble choice game.  The extent to which grouping arrangements were or could be enforced and,...

In this paper we investigate the efficacy of illicit electoral tactics and the characteristics which make a society prone to such tactics.  We first investigate the chances of an incumbent head of government winning an election.  We find that in those elections in which illicit tactics were...

Although cultural practices often have important consequences for household consumption and economic performance, they are seldom studied by economists.  To fill this gap we study the impact of taboos on agriculture and poverty.  Madagascar is a good case study for this purpose given the...