Credit constraints are an almost ubiquitous assumption in development economics.  Yet direct evidence for credit constraints is limited, and many observations consistent with credit constraints are equally compatible with precautionary saving or myopic (non-forward-looking) consumption.  Using...

This paper constructs country-level aggregates of trade facilitation measures from firm-level responses in the Enterprise Surveys and compares them with the Doing Business indicators, the Logistics Performance Index and the Enabling Trade Index.  Correlations between the data sources are low...

Economists have traditionally assumed that individual behavior is motivated exclusively by extrinsic incentives.  Social physchologists, in contrast, stress that intrinsic motivations are also important.  In recent work, economic theorists have started to build psychological factors, like...

The paper by Atkinson, Riani and Ceroli, henceforth ARC, is concerned with detection of outliers and unsuspected structures which is rather important in practice.  This is done through a Forward Search Algorithm.  The statistical analysis of such algorithms poses many challenging problems, and...

While the numbers with completed tertiary level education are low in Africa, both relative to other countries and in absolute terms, they have been growing very rapidly.  Three questions are addressed in this paper.  The first is how higher education links to other forms of capital...

Free trade agreements (FTAs) lead to a rise in bilateral trade even if the signatories include developing countries.  Furthermore, the percentage increase in bilateral trade is higher for South-South agreements than for North-South agreements.  The results are robust across a number of gravity...

Medical knowledge - defined broadly to include both its private and public forms - has been the driving force behind the historical transitions that have raised life expectancy in modern Europe.  Advances in knowledge, rather than better nutrition (particularly the escape from caloric...

Among affluent countries, those with market-liberal welfare regimes (which are also English-speaking) tend to have the highest prevalence of obesity.  The impact of cheap, accessible high-energy food is often invoked in explanation.  An alternative approach is that overeating is a response to...

In the past 30 years, microfinance has carried many promises of social and economic transformation, with the shift towards targeting women being seen as a major strategic move through which the promise of social development could be most effectively delivered.  However, ethnographic studies...

This paper addresses the question as to why we observe such large differentials in earnings in urban African labour markets after controlling for observable human capital.  We first use a three year panel across Ghana and Tanzania and find common patterns for both countries assuming that...