In this paper we analyze the impact of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on child labor and school attendance of Palestinian children in the West Bank between the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada (September 2000) and the end of 2006. In particular, we investigate the effects, on children' s...

In the past, industrial countries have tended to pursue countercyclical or, at worst, acyclical fiscal policy. In sharp contrast, emerging and developing countries have followed procyclical fiscal policy, thus exacerbating the underlying business cycle. We show that, over the last decade, about...

Based on two extensions, this paper proposes a re-appraisal of the concept of the pollution terms of trade (PTT) introduced by Antweiler (1996). First, detailed data allows capturing the effect of differences in emission intensities across countries and over time. Second, relying on Johnson and...

The conflict in Darfur has been described both as an ethnic cleansing campaign, carried out by the Sudanese government and its allied militias, and as a local struggle over dwindling natural resources between African farmers and Arab herders. In this paper, we use a previously unexploited data...

Despite that insect-resistant Bt cotton has been lauded for its ability to reduce the use of pesticides, studies have shown that Chinese Bt cotton farmers continue to use excessive amounts of pesticides. Using results from a survey and an artefactual field experiment, we find that farmers who...

When seeking to build high quality and cost-effective infrastructure in rural villages, a fundamental question is: Who is better at doing so? Should the village leadership or a government agency above the village finance and/or manage the construction of the infrastructure project? To answer...

To raise school participation, many programs in developing countries eliminate or reduce private contributions to education. Using data from a randomized experiment in Ecuador, we ironically find that announcing a free school uniform program had a negative impact on attendance. The school...

While strong social ties help individuals cope with missing institutions, trade is essentially limited to those who are part of the social network. We examine what makes the decision to trust a stranger different from the decision to trust a member of a given social network (a friend), by...

This paper investigates how failing to consider missing funds in public resource delivery can lead to misleading conclusions on the nature and correlates of targeting performance. Combining administrative data on disbursement and household survey data on receipt under Indonesia's anti-poverty...

One of the concerns over globalization is that as nations compete for investment, they relax labor standards to attract firms. Using spatial estimation on panel data for 135 countries over 17years, we find that the labor standards in one country are positively correlated with those elsewhere...