Kosovo is a war-torn corner of the former Yugoslavia, where a civil war between ethnic Albanians and ethnic Serbs raged during most of the 1990s. We examine the incidence and depth of poverty and some of its correlates in post-conflict Kosovo using the Living Standards Measurement Survey....

Women who want to work often face many more hurdles than men. This is true in Tajikistan, where there is a large gender gap in labour force participation (LFP). We highlight the effects of two factors – international migration and education – on the LFP decision and its gender gap. Using...

We study the dynamics of the cross-section distribution of patents per capita for the 48 continental US states from 1930 to 2000 using a discrete-state Markov chain. We test for and find evidence in favor of the (knowledge) convergence hypothesis. The distribution of patents is converging to a...

Despite a significant expansion of the literature on conflicts and fragility of states, only a few systematic attempts have been made to link the theoretical literature on social conflicts to the available micro-level information about the people who are involved in these conflicts. We address...

Using a rich sample of admission records from New Orleans Touro Infirmary, we examine the in-hospital mortality risk of free and enslaved patients. Despite a higher mortality rate in the general population, slaves were significantly less likely to die in the hospital than the whites. We analyze...

We measure the income assimilation of migrants to Germany employing a new measure of assimilation that uses the whole income distribution rather than selected moments. To do this we implement a discrete-state Markov chain to model the dynamics of the cross-sectional income distribution of...