When market structure is complete, factor demands by households will be independent of their characteristics, and households will take their production decisions as if they were profit-maximizing firms. This observation constitutes the basis for one of the most popular empirical tests for...

In this paper we consider different explanations for why the coefficient associated with human capital is often negative in growth regressions once country-specific effects are controlled for whereas the coefficient in question is strongly positive in cross-sectional or panel results based on...

The social science literature has done much to document pervasive racial discrimination in Brazil and there is little doubt that a very dark color is a handicap to social advancement. Nevertheless, very few empirical economic studies have attempted to quantify the impact of ethnic discrimination...

This paper examines the relative magnitudes of "sheepskin effects" in the returns to education for the three main ethnic groups in the Metropolitan Region of Salvador (MRS), Bahia state, in Northeastern Brazil, and ascertains whether their pattern is consistent with a simple signalling model. We...

When market structure is complete, factor demands by households will be independent of their characteristics, and households will take their production decisions as if they were profit-maximizing firms. This observation constitutes the basis for one of the most popular empirical tests for...

This paper focuses on instrument choice while consistently estimating the returns to education in Vietnam. Using VLSS data, we explore different sets of exogenous instruments that rely on demand and supply side sources of variation in schooling as well as the matrix of instruments proposed by...

When market structure is complete, factor demands by households will be independent of their characteristics, and households will take their production decisions as if they were profit-maximizing firms. This observation constitutes the basis for one of the most popular empirical tests for...

This paper aims to provide the first evidence concerning the relationship between time and risk preferences and illegal migration in an African context. Based upon our theoretical model and using a unique data set on potential migrants collected in urban Senegal, we evaluate a measure of time...

We formalize the link between optimal cost-sharing contracts and the production technology in the presence of moral hazard by appealing to several well-known results from duality theory. Building on intuitions from the interlinkage literature, we show that optimal contractual structure is...

In this paper we consider the link often alleged between ethnic diversity and the growth rate of GDP per capita. We first assume that it is ethnic polarization rather than ethnic fragmentation that is harmful for growth so that the relationship may be non-linear. Second, we hypothesize that the...