While household-level inequality is well-documented for a large set of industrialized economies, little is known about the same distributional facts of consumption, income and wealth in developing countries, in particular, for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This paper works toward closing this gap....

During a war, the Commercial Elites are able to withhold resources from the King. If a defensive war is lost the King is replace by an alternate. The threat of losing such a war may lead the King to hand over power to the Commercial Elites in exchange of financial support to defend the country....

This paper develops a model of HIV diffusion among heterosexual individuals who choose (i) whether to engage in sex, i.e. the source of potential infection, (ii) the nature of their relationship as measured by the endogenous rate of partnership destruction, (iii) the presence of extra-marital...

Our premilinary findings suggest that the elasticity of substitution between skill groups displays a large tilted inverse-S pattern. The elasticity slowly raises from 1975 to early 1990s about 3-4 times its original value, and slowly declines to its original value until it abruptly rises again...

In this paper, we use an extended version of the neoclassical multi-country growth model to explore the efficiency in the allocation of physical capital across countries. In our framework, the observed marginal product of capital (MPK) can differ across countries because of two different...

In this dissertation I study the consequences of the AIDS epidemic for economic development. To this purpose I build a population model that keeps track of the demographic transition by age-specific population groups relating the age distribution of the population of each period to the preceding...

In this paper, we employ both calibration and modern (Bayesian) estimation methods to assess the role of neutral and investment-specific technology shocks in generating fluctuations in hours. Using a neoclassical stochastic growth model, we show how answers are shaped by the identification...

Using detailed household-farm level data from Malawi, we measure real farm total factor productivity (TFP) controlling for a wide array of factor inputs, land quality, and transitory shocks. The distribution of farm TFP has substantial dispersion but factor inputs are roughly evenly spread among...