This paper addresses the problem of ranking growth episodes from a microeconomic perspective. While most of the existing criteria, framed in the pro-poor growth tradition, are either based on anonymous individuals or use to identify them on the base of their status in the initial period, this...

This paper deals with the origin and the evolution of the European system of fiscal rules and discusses the perspectives for future developments. The early debate about the design of establishing a monetary union in a not optimal currency area, with decentralized fiscal policies, is...

Personality traits are highly predictive of life outcomes and successes.  However, little is known about their formation and what can hamper their development.  There is ample evidence that conditions in early-life can have persistent influence on health and cognitive skills.  In this paper,...

We show that rainfall, temperature, and commodity price shocks predict unrest in colonial French West Africa between 1906 and 1956.  We use a simple model of taxation and anti-tax resistance to explain these results.  In the colonial period, the response of unrest to economic shocks was...

Thanks to anti-retroviral therapies, people living with HIV in developing countries can now have a near-normal life at a cost of a few hundred dollars per year.  We postulate that given this newly low cost of maintaining lives, there is a moral duty to rescue those who are infected.  The core...

Gender bias against girls in nineteenth-century England has received much interest but establishing its existence has proved difficult.  We utilise data on heights of 16,402 children working in northern textile factories in 1837 to examine whether gender bias was evident.  Current...

The exchange between Epstein (2010) and Klibanoff et al. (2012) identified a behavioral issue that sharply distinguishes between two classes of models of ambiguity sensitivity, exemplified by the Î±-MEU model and the smooth ambiguity model, respectively. The issue in question is whether a...

Using data for 128 countries we document low (high) elasticities of agricultural output with respect to labor in economies within temperate (tropical/highland) climate zones.  Adopting a standard model of structural change we show that this technology heterogeneity determines the speed of...

Agricultural and other physically demanding sectors are important sources of growth in developing countries but prevalent diseases such as malaria adversely impact the productivity, labor supply, and occupational choice of workers in these sectors by reducing physical capacity.  This study...

Schooling is typically found to be highly correlated with individual earnings in African countries.  However, African firm or sector level studies have failed to identify a similarly strong effect for average worker schooling levels on productivity.  This has been interpreted as evidence that...