This paper is the first systematic attempt to measure the existence and degree of dowry inflation in South Asia. The … popular press and scholarly literature have assumed dowry inflation in South Asia for some time, and there are now a number of … systematic study of dowry inflation. Using large-sample retrospective survey data from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal, we …

innovations, and negatively correlated with inflation innovations. The disinflationary nature of news shocks is consistent with …

We assess the quantitative impact of firing costs on aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) in a dynamic general …-equilibrium framework where the distribution of establishment-level productivity is not invariant to the policy. Firing costs not only … losses. Firing costs equivalent to 5 year's wages imply a drop in TFP of more than 20 percent. Factor misallocation accounts …

, is difficult to observe and costly to verify. We study the effect of application costs on the targeting of disability … increased travel times or costs of information gathering …

trade costs affect the extent to which various countries participate in domestic, regional or global value chains, and …

This paper studies the performance of a large number of anomalies after accounting for transaction costs, and the … statistically significant net spreads, at least when designed to mitigate transaction costs. Few of the strategies with higher … turnover do. In all cases transaction costs reduce the strategies' profitability and its associated statistical significance …

of selection and the comparative statics of politician quality depend critically on how the costs of running for office …

the majority of the lifetime costs of the poorest households and significantly reduces their risk …