This paper estimates the impact of aggregate fluctuations on the time-varying trade policies of thirteen major emerging economies over 1989–2010; by 2010, these WTO member countries collectively accounted for 21% of world merchandise imports and 22% of world GDP. We examine determinants of...

Many children worldwide are left-behind by parents migrating for work — over 61 million in rural China alone, almost half of whom are left-behind by both parents. While previous literature considers impacts of one parent absent on educational inputs (e.g., study time, enrollment, schooling...

Can schooling promotion deter child participation in hazardous forms of child labor? We examine two interventions intended to promote schooling and deter child labor for children associated with carpet factories in Kathmandu. The first intervention provides scholarships for school-related...

This paper studies the transmission of monetary shocks to lending rates in a large sample of advanced, emerging, and low-income countries. Transmission is measured by the impulse response of bank lending rates to monetary policy shocks. Long-run restrictions are used to identify such shocks....

We examine the effect of rainfall shocks on dowry deaths using data from 583 Indian districts for 2002–2007. We find that a one standard deviation decline in annual rainfall from the local mean increases reported dowry deaths by 7.8%. Wet shocks have no apparent effect. We examine patterns of...

Growth theory predicts that natural disasters should, on impact, lower GDP per capita. However, the empirical literature does not offer conclusive evidence. Most existing studies use disaster data drawn from damage records of insurance companies. We argue that this may lead to estimation bias as...

This paper develops a theory of sequential lending in groups in micro-finance that centers on the notion of dynamic incentives, in particular the simple idea that default incentives should be relatively uniformly distributed across time. In a framework that allows project returns to accrue over...

We estimate the impacts of the introduction of National Health Insurance in Taiwan in March 1995 on infant survival. Prior to NHI, government workers (the control group) possessed health insurance policies with comprehensive coverage for births and infant medical care services. Private sector...

This paper develops a dynamic framework to analyze the political sustainability of economic reforms in developing countries. First, we demonstrate that economic reforms that are proceeding successfully may run into a political impasse, with the reform's initial success having a negative impact...

We quantify the impact of adult deaths on household economic wellbeing, using a large longitudinal dataset spanning more than a decade. Verbal autopsies allow us to distinguish AIDS mortality from that due to other causes. The timing of the lower socioeconomic status observed for households with...