The size effect can be attributed to the relative importance of growth options versus assets-in-place in total assets. By incorporating the changing trend of growth options over firm lifecycle into the dynamic investment model developed by Berk et al. (1999), this paper demonstrates that the...

Lack of sanitation and poor hygiene behavior cause a tremendous disease burden among the poor. This paper evaluates the impact of the Total Sanitation and Sanitation Marketing project in Indonesia, where about 11 percent of children have diarrhea in any two-week period and more than 33,000...

This paper investigates how reductions of barriers to migration affect the decision of middle school graduates to attend high school in rural China. Change in the cost of migration is identified using exogenous variation across counties in the timing of national identity card distribution, which...

In this paper, the authors examine the impact of reductions in barriers to migration on the consumption of rural households in China. The authors find that increased migration from rural villages leads to significant increases in consumption per capita, and that this effect is stronger for...

This study examined the effect of local officials' political capital on poverty alleviation by using a manually compiled database of county party secretaries (CPSs) in impoverished counties in China. The empirical results reveal that CPSs with political capital positively affect poverty...

Increased ability to migrate from China's rural villages contributed to significant increases in the consumption per capita of both non-durable and durable goods, and these effects were larger in magnitude for households that were relatively poor before the easing of restrictions to migration....

Telescoping errors occur if survey respondents misdate events from outside the reference period and include them in their recall. Concern about telescoping influenced the design of early Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) surveys, which used a two-visit interview format to bound food...

Recruiting and retaining leaders and public servants at the grass-roots level in developing countries creates a potential tension between providing sufficient returns to attract talent and limiting the scope for excessive rent-seeking behavior. In China, researchers have frequently argued that...

This article examines the impacts of China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) on prices in its agricultural sector. The analysis uses a new methodology to estimate nominal protection rates in China's agricultural sector before its accession to the WTO. These new measures account...

Researchers often use unit values (household expenditures on a commodity divided by the quantity purchased) as proxies for market prices when calculating poverty lines and estimating consumer demand equations. Such proxies are often needed because community price surveys in developing economies...