Many developing and emerging market countries have subsidies on fuel products. Using a small open economy model with a non-traded sector, I show how these subsidies impact the steady state levels of macroeconomic aggregates such as consumption, labor supply, and aggregate welfare. These...

This paper examines the effect of automatic grade promotion on academic achievement in 1993 public primary schools in Brazil. A difference-in-differences approach that exploits variation over time and across schools in the grade promotion regime allows the identification of the treatment effect...

Poverty measures often ignore the distribution of resources within families and the gains from joint consumption. In this paper, we estimate the allocation process and adult economies of scale in households from Côte d'Ivoire using a collective model of household consumption. Identification...

This paper investigates the role of a free press and the circulation of information on the capacity of a country to declare an exchange regime that differs from the regime it implements de facto. We report consistent evidence that greater press freedom and easier access to information result in...

Taller workers are paid higher wages. A prominent explanation for this pattern is that physical growth and cognitive development share childhood inputs, inducing a correlation between adult height and two productive skills: strength and intelligence. This paper explores the relative roles of...

Movements in and out of poverty are of core interest to both policymakers and economists. Yet the panel data needed to analyze such movements are rare. In this paper we build on the methodology used to construct poverty maps to show how repeated cross-sections of household survey data can allow...

A defining feature of many poor economies is the large fraction of workers engaged in subsistence agriculture. We develop a multi-sector multi-region model of a poor economy in which it is costly to transport goods across regions in order to study this outcome. A key finding is that higher...

Recent decentralization reforms in developing countries have often lead to the coexistence of multiple tiers of government in given policy areas, triggering new accountability issues. This paper provides a novel theoretical treatment of the efficiency consequences of such ‘partial expenditure...

Understanding the informal sector – that represents about 60–90% of urban employment in developing countries – has a significant importance for any strategy and policy interventions aiming to alleviate poverty and improve welfare. I formulate and estimate a model of entrepreneurial choice...

What drives governments with similar revenues to provide very different amounts of goods with private sector substitutes? Education is a prime example. I use exogenous shocks to Brazilian municipalities' revenue during 1995–2008 generated by non-linearities in federal transfer laws to...