Rural households comprise a large share of the population in developing countries. This dissertation examines how the welfare of these households, whose economic activity mainly relies on agriculture, is affected by weather shocks and healthshocks in the context of West Africa and Vietnam. In...

The economic consequences of international migration have spurred vigorous debates among policy makers. There also are discussions within the economics literature, with labor economists disagreeing on whether immigration is beneficial for host economies and development economists having...

This paper analyzes how preferences for a non-economic characteristic, such as caste, can affect equilibrium patterns of matching in the marriage market, and empirically evaluates this in the context of arranged marriages among middle-class Indians. We develop a model that demonstrates how the...

This paper explores how a rise in a gender’s scarcity may impact educational investments using exogenous variation in the marriage market of second generation Americans in early 20th century. Theoretically, one may expect this to occur through two potential channels: a change in matching...

Can shifts in output mix or technologies attenuate the impact of immigration on wages? We explore this using immigration-induced changes in relative labor supply at the county level in US Censuses of Agriculture in early 20th century. An increase in labor supply induced a shift away from...

SThis paper explores how a rise in a gender’s scarcity may impact educational investments using exogenous variation in the marriage market of second generation Americans in early 20th century. Theoretically, one may expect this to occur through two potential channels: a change in matching...

This paper studies the dynamic effect of networks on location and occupation decisions of immigrants to the United States between 1900 and 1930. We compare the distributions of immigrants both by intended and actual state of residence to counterfactual distributions constructed by allocating the...

This paper studies the role played by caste, education and other social and economic attributes in arranged marriages among middle-class Indians. We use a unique data set on individuals who placed matrimonial advertisements in a major newspaper, the responses they received, how they ranked them,...

The relative size of services industries has increased in most industrialized countries in recent decades. In Canada, the value-added share of services in the economy has increased from about 55 per cent in the early 1960s to more than 70 per cent in the 1990s. Studies suggest that this reflects...