"Patrinos and Sakellariou use a nationally representative household survey to estimate returns to schooling in Venezuela from instrumental variables based on a supply-side intervention in the education market. These estimates apply to a subgroup of liquidity-constrained individuals, in the...

"Do public sector workers earn a wage premium in Djibouti and are the returns to education different across the sectors? The authors estimate private and public sector wage earnings using 1996 household survey data, while controlling for selectivity using Heckman's two stage approach. They find...

"Under price ceilings and quality floors for agricultural inputs in cash crop sectors in developing countries where credit markets are weak, imperfect information on the ability of farmers to pay for their inputs at the end of the cropping season may lead the decentralized production of those...

"The author assesses empirically the relationship between natural disaster risk and investment in education. Although the results in the empirical literature tend to be inconclusive, using model averaging methods in the framework of cross-country and panel regressions, this paper finds an...

"Are natural resources a blessing or a curse? Bravo-Ortega and De Gregorio present a model in which natural resources have a positive effect on the level of income and a negative effect on its growth rate. The positive and permanent effect on income implies a welfare gain. There is a growth...

"Freund and Ozden provide new survey evidence showing that loss aversion and reference dependence are important in shaping people's perception of trade policy. Under the assumption that agents' welfare functions exhibit these behavioral elements, they analyze a model with a welfare-maximizing...