Grades at U.S. colleges and universities have increased precipitously over the last 50 years, suggesting that the signaling power of grades has become attenuated. Moreover, average grades have risen disproportionately in some departments, implying that weak students in departments with high...

Few studies have attempted to investigate the link between poverty and vulnerability with respect to natural disasters. By applying a utility model to panel data from Indonesia that brackets a major forest fire, this paper estimates and analyzes households’ vulnerability in both total...

Despite success in reducing poverty over the last twenty years, inequality in Chile has remained virtually unchanged, making Chile one of the least equal countries in the world. High levels of inequality have been shown to hamper further reductions in poverty as well as economic growth and local...

Media coverage of humanitarian crises is widely believed to influence charitable giving, yet this assertion has received little empirical scrutiny. Using Internet donations after the 2004 tsunami as a case study, we show that media coverage of disasters has a dramatic impact on donations to...

This paper examines the relationship between the media coverage of a major natural disaster and charitable giving for disaster relief. In particular, it is centrally concerned with three questions: first, whether media coverage of Cyclone Nargis in May 2008 is correlated with charitable giving...

Despite rapid economic growth and poverty reduction, inequality in Chile has remained high and remarkably constant over the last 20 years, prompting academic and public interest in the subject. Due to data limitations, however, research on inequality in Chile has concentrated on the national and...

This paper analyzes the relationship between a woman's intrahousehold bargaining position and her welfare within marriage. Simultaneity problems common to the literature are overcome by using dowry to proxy for bargaining position. Omitted variable bias is addressed by using grain shocks in the...