We compare four explanations for the value of diplomas, each of which has implications for unemployment and wage variation amongst graduates, most of which have not previously been tested for when seeking to explain the effects of diplomas. We test for these implications using a refined...

Does women’s empowerment strengthen global good citizenship? We test theories of democratic foreign policy and feminist international relations that suggest that more deeply democratic countries with greater gender equity will be stronger international human rights promoters. First, the...

We exploit panel data and large, abrupt, and unusual dislocations of Indonesian workers in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis to investigate the robustness and persistence of inter-industry wage differentials (IWDs). Unobserved worker characteristics explain 36% of IWDs. IWDs persist through...

This paper studies the targeting outcomes of a self-targeted rice subsidy program in the Philippines. We find modest within-community targeting outcomes, but weak between-community targeting. This appears to be because, controlling for the direct influence of household characteristics,...

Mexico’s college premium rose in the 1990s. Studies employing structural decomposition analyses treat the college premium as the relative price of “skilled” to “unskilled” workers. They find that reallocations of labor across industries and occupations cannot account for rising college...

This paper uses data from a 2003 rural survey to examine the determinants of household provision of environmental services under China's Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP), the largest payments for environmental services program in the developing world. The paper examines the determinants of...

We examine the effects of trade and services liberalization on wage inequality in India. We find that labor reallocations and wage shifts attributable to liberalization account for at most 29% of the increase in inequality between 1993 and 2004, and that the effects of services reforms are many...

Theft rates from subsidized food programs vary greatly and strongly influence program efficiency. Unfortunately, the determinants of these variations remain understudied because the agencies that run these programs seldom publicize the allocations of subsidized food to local markets. We develop...

We argue that subsidized food distribution systems that fail to publicize how much food has been allocated to each local market will experience high rates of theft on the margin as they are expanded. We provide the first comparable cross-section of estimates of subsidized food theft. As...