This paper investigates whether parents’ inherent gender bias is associated with intrahousehold human capital investment among boys and girls. We conduct an artifactual field experiment to identify parents’ inherent gender bias and then attempt to examine how this attitude correlates with...

This paper uses a novel identification strategy proposed by Lewbel (2012, J. Bus. Econ. Stat.) to illustrate how causation between job satisfaction and life satisfaction can be established with cross-sectional data. In addition to examining the relationship between composite job satisfaction and...

We study the effects of economic shocks on civil conflict at the subnational level using a panel data set of 5,689 administrative regions from 53 African countries with yearly observations from 1992 to 2010. We find that economic shocks, measured by nighttime light intensity and instrumented by...

We present a novel approach to address differences between stated and paid choices by incentivizing stated choices in a randomized field experiment. The treatment increases consequentiality in the field by making each decision financially relevant. Our results show that the treatment effect is...

A recent class of factor demand models is discussed and used to analyze U.S. state-level production data. The approach accommodates output risk, heterogeneous technologies, technological change, endogenous variables, aggregation across agents, and more general flexible functional forms than...

Individual fertility preference is influenced by observed social norms. The present paper estimates the effect of the observed fertility of peers on a woman’s fertility preference. We find that both neighbourhood peers and religious peers have a significant impact on individual fertility...

The system of prior appropriation in the Western Unites States prioritizes property rights for water based on the establishment of beneficial use, creating a hierarchy where rights initiated first are more secure. I estimate the demand for security in water rights through their capitalization in...

Within labour economics, returns to education is an area of focused research. Moreover, amongst the studies looking at the emerging economies, China is the most widely studied economy. While there is general consensus that returns to education are positive, studies use various datasets and...

This paper examines the long-term effects of exposure to civil war and genocide on the educational attainment and labor productivity of individuals in Cambodia. Given the well-documented causal links between schooling and labor productivity, it is surprising that past studies show that civil...

Using a competitive search (price-posting) model, Lester (2011) shows that improving buyers’ price information can counter-intuitively lead to higher prices. We test this result using a lab experiment. Moving from 0 to 1uninformed buyers leads to higher prices in both 2(seller)x2(buyer) and...