The arrival of global retail chains in developing countries is causing a radical transformation in the way that households source their consumption. This paper draws on a new collection of Mexican microdata to estimate the effect of foreign supermarket entry on household welfare. The richness of...

Many rural households in low and middle income countries continue to rely on small-scale agriculture as their primary source of income. In the absence of irrigation, income arrives only once or twice per year, and has to cover consumption and input needs until the subsequent harvest. We develop...

In nineteenth century America, most employment, particularly that in agriculture, was highly seasonal. Thus the movement of labor from outdoor to indoor must have increased labor hours and days per year, thereby resulting in higher national income and greater economic growth. We provide the...

In a recent paper Barsky and Miron (1989) examine the seasonal fluctuations in the U. S. economy. They show that the key stylized facts about the business cycle characterize the seasonal cycle as well, and they suggest that the interpretation of many of these stylized facts over the seasonal...

In an important and provocative paper, `Does Compulsory School Attendance Affect Schooling and Earnings?', Angrist and Krueger use quarter of birth as an instrument for educational attainment in wage equations. To support a causal interpretation of their estimates, they argue that compulsory...

We show there is a strong, positive correlation across countries and industries between the standard deviation of the seasonal component and the standard deviation of the non-seasonal component of aggregate variables such as output, labor input, interest rates, and prices. After documenting this...

Existing research has documented cross-sectional seasonality of stock returns—the periodic outperformance of certain stocks during the same calendar months or weekdays. A model in which assets differ in their sensitivities to investor mood explains these effects and implies other seasonal...

Using disaggregated production data we show that the size of seasonal cycles changes significantly over the course of the business cycle. In particular, during periods of high economy-wide activity, some industries smooth seasonal fluctuations while others exaggerate them. We interpret this...

Every year has large demand and supply shifts associated with the seasons, regardless of the phase of the business cycle. Based on measures dating back to the 1940s, the seasonal shifts reject the hypotheses that demand shifts affect employment outcomes significantly more in recession years than...