Using data for the Philippines, I develop and estimate a heterogeneous agent model to analyze the role of monetary policy in a small open economy subject to sizable remittance fluctuations. I include “rule-of-thumb” households with no access to financial markets and test whether remittances...

I present a theory explaining why less technologically advanced countries could be more vulnerable to the Dutch disease. In a bilateral trade model with monopolistic competition and increasing returns to scale, the extent of the crowding-out in the tradable sector depends positively on an...

The impact of competition on school performance is likely to depend on whether parents are informed about schools' effectiveness or value added (which may or may not be correlated with absolute measures of their quality), and on whether this information influences their school choices, thereby...

Voter education campaigns often aim to increase political participation and accountability. We followed a randomized campaign against electoral violence sponsored by an international NGO during the 2007 Nigerian elections. This paper investigates whether the effects of the campaign were...

Combining data from the Moroccan census of manufacturing enterprises with information from a commune survey, we test whether firm expansion is affected by local financial development. Our findings are consistent with this hypothesis: local bank availability is robustly associated with faster...

This paper studies a two-sector economy in which one of the sectors (the “commodity sector”) depends in part on the exploitation of a renewable natural resource and examines the issue in an economy-wide context where both natural resources and a man-made asset change endogenously over time....

Do attitudinal surveys and incentivized experiments predict actual behavior? We answer this question using data on trust and pro-sociality from experiments and surveys conducted on six Latin American cities. Individuals in agreement with a set of pro-social statements who also either are willing...

Theoretical and empirical studies exploring the effects of income inequality upon growth reach a disappointing inconclusive result. This paper postulates that one reason for this ambiguity is that income inequality is actually a composite measure of inequality of opportunity and inequality of...

We analyze an international migration episode for which we are able to gather individual-level data covering all relevant countries, namely the exodus of Ecuadorians to Spain and the US in the aftermath of the economic collapse of 1999. Specifically, we produce selection-corrected predictions of...

We analyze the relationship between product market competition and corruption. The existing literature typically views corruption as extortion of “pre-existing” rents. This perspective suggests that competition usually reduces corruption, although generally the sign of this relationship is...