Pesticide spraying by farmers has an adverse impact on their health. However, in studies to date examining farmers' exposure to pesticides, the costs of ill-health and their determinants have been based on information provided by farmers themselves. Some doubt has therefore been cast on the...

Extraction of groundwater for onion and other cash crop production has been increasing rapidly during the last two decades in the dry zone areas of Sri Lanka. As a result of overuse, the quantity of available groundwater is gradually declining, while water quality is deteriorating. The...

We develop a stochastic political economy model to explain the trade-off between growth and inequality during the process of technology adoption. In the model endogenous growth occurs through physical and human capital deepening. Agents can adopt either of the two risky high-return technologies,...

We develop a stochastic endogenous growth model to explain the diversity in growth and inequality patterns and the non-convergence of incomes in transitional economies where an underdeveloped financial sector imposes an implicit, fixed cost on the diversification of idiosyncratic risk. In the...

Algan and Cahuc in "Inherited Trust and Growth" (AER, 2010) argue that "inherited trust" is a key factor in explaining growth rates across countries. They derive a measure of inherited trust by linking respondents' "home countries" in the United States General Social Survey (1972-2004) and the...

This note examines the productive efficiency of 62 starting guards during the 2011/12 National Basketball Association (NBA) season. This period coincides with the phenomenal and largely unanticipated performance of New York Knicks’ starting point guard Jeremy Lin and the attendant public and...

This study investigates the citation patterns of theoretical and empirical papers over a period of almost 30 years, while also exploring the determinants of citation success. The results indicate that empirical papers attract more citation success than theoretical studies. However, the pattern...

The study examines the impact of financial globalisation on intra-sector and inter-sector firm level reallocation of capital in South Africa using panel data for the period 1991-2008. The measure of efficient reallocation of capital is based on the variation of firm's marginal returns to capital...

Using a natural voting experiment in Switzerland that encompasses a 160-year period (1848–2009), we investigate whether a higher level of complexity leads to increased reliance on expert knowledge. We find that when more referenda are held on the same day, constituents are more likely to refer...

In this paper, we seek to explain the changes in aggregate happiness over the lifecycle. The advantage of looking at the aggregate level of happiness is that it solves the problems of missing peer effects and measurement error that plague models of individual level happiness, though the...