Does work experience gained in the informal sector affect the career prospects of less-educated workers? This paper examines two roles that informal sector jobs play in the early stages of a worker's career: informal jobs may (i) provide the opportunity to accumulate skills, and (ii) act as a...

Roughly one-third of the rural population in developing countries lives in arid and semiarid regions, facing recurrent water scarcity. This is likely to become an even more common situation with climate change. This paper analyzes the impact of rainfall fluctuations during the gestational period...

Trade liberalizations have been shown to improve domestic firms' performance through the new varieties of imported intermediate inputs. This paper uses a unique, representative sample of Bangladeshi garment firms to highlight that local intermediate inputs may also enhance domestic firms'...

Although most theoretical models of household decision making assume perfect information, empirical studies suggest that information asymmetries can have large impacts on resource allocation. I demonstrate the importance of these asymmetries in transnational households, where physical distance...

SARS struck Taiwan in 2003, causing a national crisis. Many people feared that SARS would spread through the health care system, and outpatient visits fell by more than 30% in the course of a few weeks. We examine how both public information and the behavior and opinions of peers contributed to...

I present the first value-added models of learning production in private and government schools in India using unique panel data from Andhra Pradesh state. I examine the heterogeneity in private school value-added across different subjects, urban and rural areas, medium of instruction, and...

This paper sheds light on the relationship between oil rent and the allocation of talent, toward rent-seeking versus more productive activities, conditional on the quality of institutions. Using a sample of 69 developing countries, we demonstrate that oil resources orient university students...

If relative prices of goods within a commodity group are constant, Hicksian separability lets the price of a single good represent the group price level. This is relied on by price questionnaires used with household surveys in developing countries and when constructing temporal and spatial...

Unreliable inputs to production, particularly those that are difficult to store, can significantly limit firms' productivity, leading them to react in a number of ways. This paper uses a panel of 23,000 energy-intensive, Chinese firms from 1999 to 2004 to examine how firms responded to severe...

While it is commonly understood that land is a political tool, there is surprisingly little empirical research on how insecure property rights affect political outcomes. In this paper, we show how a dominant political party can use insecure property rights to ensure politically compliant voter...