This paper takes a fresh look at the issue of foreign aid fungibility.  Unlike the bulk of existing empirical studies, I employ panel data that contain information on the specific purpose for which aid is given.  This allows me to link aid given for education and healt purposes to recipient...

This paper analyses the effects of trade liberalisation and technical change on real and relative wages.  It builds a model with monopolistic competition, heterogeneous firms and two countries, North and South, and solves it numerically.  Skill-biased technical change, caused by decreases in...

We report the short-term results from a randomized evaluation of a mobile phone literacy and numeracy program (Project ABC) in Niger, in which adult literacy students learned how to use mobile phones as part of a literacy and numeracy class.  Students in ABC villages showed substantial gains in...

The Kenyan Constituency Development Fund (CDF) aims to alleviate poverty by allocating resources to constituencies which MPs and residents decide how to spend.  In this paper we assess whether MPs' re-election chances were affected by their management of the CDF.  For this purpose we analyse...

Empirical studies of intra-household allocation has revealed that, in many instances, gender is an important determinant in the allocation of resources within the household.  Yet, within the theoretical literature, why gender matters within the household remains an open question.  In this...

The Zollverein, the German customs union of 1834, was the institutional centrepiece of Germany's economic unification.  A bargaining model is applied to analyze the structure of its negotiation process and accession sequence.  The existence of negative coalition externalities, the effect of a...

We derive the parameter restrictions that a standard equity market model implies for a bivariate vector autoregression for stock prices and dividends, and we show how to test these restrictions using likelihood ratio tests.  The restrictions, which imply that stock returns are unpredictable,...

This paper identifies the effect of neighborhood peer groups on childhood skill acquisitions using observational data.  We incorporate spatial peer interaction, defined as a child's nearest geographical neighbors, into a prodiction function of child cognitive development in Andhra Pradesh,...

Our strategy for automatic selection in potentially non-linear processes is: test for non-linearity in the unrestricted linear formulation; if that test rejects, specify a general model using polynomials, to be simplified to a minimal congruent representation; finally select by encompassing...

We model expenditure on food in the USA, using an extended time series.  Even when a theory is essentially 'correct', it can manifest serious mis-specification if just fitted to data, ignoring its observed characteristics and major external events such as wars, recessions and policy changes. ...