This paper uses a 13-year panel of individuals in Tanzania to assess how adult mortality shocks affect both short and long-run consumption growth of surviving household members. Using unique data which tracks individuals from 1991 to 2004, we examine consumption growth, controlling for a set of...

Evidence for Malawi and other developing countries suggests the existence of labor shortages at the peak of the cropping season, with negative impacts on the ability of households to make the most of their endowments such as land. At the same time, for most of the year, there is substantial...

A common phenomenon about transition economies is that the return to schooling improves as economic reform progresses. Existing research suggests that Vietnam is not an exception to the pattern. However, the rate of return for the period 1992-1998 is still relatively low, below 5%, relative to...

This paper uses a novel dataset collected by the first author from peri-urban areas of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in 2008 to examine how the poor use their loans, and factors affecting their credit participation and credit constraints. The paper finds the presence of many commercial banks in the...

We investigate the relationship between social distancing, as measured by encounter rates using cellphone proximity data, and COVID-19 infections and deaths. Consistent with the existing literature on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions, we find a positive and statistically...

Mexico’s ‘soda tax’ has been predicted to reduce average weight of Mexicans by up to three pounds, based on extant estimates of the own-price elasticity of quantity demand for soda of between −1.0 and −1.3. These elasticity estimates from household survey data are exaggerated by not...

We explore the relevancy of subjects' risk preferences recovered using a subjective risk question to those recovered from the incentivized lottery experiments of Holt and Laury (2002), Gneezy and Potters (1997), and Johnson and Webb (2016). While a statistically significant relationship between...

Many countries lack spatially disaggregated consumer price data. Yet these data are needed to estimate real inequality and spatial patterns of poverty, especially for poor countries where weak infrastructure and high transport costs create big price variation over space. We experimented in...

We conducted a salient purchasing experiment to test if an information intervention alters fizzy drinks demand. Subjects in our experiment initially made five rounds of purchases, for 14 items (energy drinks, colas, and lemonades) selected from a stratified sample of retailers. Subjects faced...

Popular DMSP night lights data are flawed by blurring, top-coding, and lack of calibration. Yet newer and better VIIRS data are rarely used in economics. We compare these two data sources for predicting Indonesian GDP at the second sub-national level. DMSP data are a bad proxy for GDP outside of...