That unmarried individuals die at a faster rate than married individuals at all ages is well documented. Unmarried women in developing countries face particularly severe vulnerabilities, so that excess mortality faced by the unmarried is more extreme for women in these regions compared to...

Using data from South Asia, this paper examines how arranged marriage cultivates rivalry among sisters. During marriage search, parents with multiple daughters reduce the reservation quality for an older daughter's groom, rushing her marriage to allow sufficient time to marry off her younger...

This chapter studies the differential effects that trade openness may have on leading and lagging regions within a country. Examining data from India, we find that while trade liberalization is associated with reduced poverty, this effect is smaller in lagging states. The expected transmission...

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 theoretical papers that have attempted to explain...

In a model that is consistent with the existence of a home bias and with foreign investors that are less informed than domestic investors, we show that unexpectedly high worldwide returns lead to net equity inflows into small countries. In addition, a small country experiences net equity inflows...

Growth has accelerated in a wide range of developing countries over the last couple of decades, resulting in an extraordinary period of convergence with the advanced economies. We analyze this experience from the lens of structural change - the reallocation of labor from low- to...

Over the last 200 years, economies have accumulated significant experience in managing capital flows in the face of globalization. This study examines management of capital flows since the 1800s with an eye towards providing historical lessons for Southeast Asia today. We start with the global...

This paper analyzes the co-movement of the exchange rates and the stock prices from the viewpoint of contagion among the eight countries in the region during the period of Asian currency crisis, 1997-1999. Ito and Hashimoto (2002; NBER working paper) proposed a new definition of high-frequency...

We examine the generalizability of internally valid estimates of causal effects in a fixed population over time when that population is subject to aggregate shocks. This temporal external validity is shown to depend upon the distribution of the aggregate shocks and the interaction between these...

Several studies link modern economic performance to institutions transplanted by European colonizers and here we extend this line of research to Asia. Japan imposed its system of well-defined property rights in land on some of its Asian colonies, including Korea, Taiwan and Palau. In 1939 Japan...