The obligation to pay bride wealth at marriage is usually associated with thecontinuation of the lineage or considered a compensation for the loss of laborfor the family that provides the bride. In this paper a different interpretationis advanced. The obligation to pay of bride wealth is seen as...

The test on the presence of full insurance that is commonly employed does not take intoaccount that households also rely on buffer stocks to shield their consumption from incomeshocks. In this paper a test is developed that deals with this omission. It is shown that in thepresence of partial...

Empirical work in labour economics has focused on rent sharing as an explanation for the observed correlation in cross-sections between wages and profitability. The alternative explanation of risk sharing between workers and employers has not been tested. Using a unique panel data set for four...

Firms have various ways to cope with external risks. This paper analyzes the risk coping behavior that entails the smoothing of inputs (labor, raw materials, or capital). The theoretical framework shows that, if they face adjustment costs, firms prefer to smooth their inputs, especially if they...

This paper uses the recent Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey 2004 to analyze the determinants and impacts of migration in Vietnam. Most of the previous studies on the determinants and impacts of migration have focused on destination rather than origin areas of migration. This limits our...

This paper tests whether the stockout/precautionary motive applies to inventories and liquid assets held by Zimbabwean manufacturing firms. The evidence indicates that involvement in imports and exports is a major source of contractual risk. Concerns about the timeliness of input deliveries and...

There are several theoretical reasons why globalization will have a narrowing as well as widening effect on the gender wage gap, but little is known about the actual impact, except for a number of country studies. The author provides a cross-country study of the impact of globalization on the...

Empirical work in labour economics has focused on rent sharing as an explanation for the observed correlation in cross-sections between wages and profitability. The alternative explanation of risk sharing between workers and employers has not been tested. Using a unique panel data set for four...

In this paper, we use firm-level panel data for the manufacturing sector in four African countries to estimate the effect of exporting on efficiency. Estimating simultaneously a production function and an export regression that control for unobserved firm effects, we find both significant...

We investigate the question whether firms in the manufacturing sector in Africa are credit constrained. The fact that few firms obtain credit is not sufficient to prove constraints, since certain firms may not have a demand for credit while others may be refused credit as part of profit...