The effects of property rights on investment are typically hypothesized to occur through a security-induced investment demand and a collateral-based credit supply. Using a two period model, this paper shows that for farms that are constrained in their access to liquidity, the investment demand...

Changes in the relative wages of workers with different amounts of education have profound implications for developing countries, where initial levels of inequality are often very high. In this paper we use micro data for five Latin American countries over the 1980s and 1990s to document trends...

The worsening degradation of natural resources urgently requires the adoption ofmore sustainable management practices. This need has led to growing interest andinvestment in monitoring systems for tracking the condition of natural resources.Although grounded in concepts of sustainability, the...

The calorie-income demand elasticity is an important parameter in thedevelopment literature and in the policy arena. Yet, there is very little evidence on theextent to which it can be considered as an unchanging parameter or a time-shiftingparameter that, for example, changes with the economic...

This paper synthesizes the results of five studies using household panel data from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Mali, Mexico and Russia, which examine the extent to which households are able through formal and/or informal arrangements to insure their consumption from specific economic shocks and...

We extend the Becker-Tomes (1986) model of intergenerational educational mobility to a rural economy characterized by occupational dualism (farm vs. nonfarm) and provide a comparative analysis of rural India and rural China. Using two exceptional data-sets, we estimate father-sons...

This paper extends the Becker-Tomes model of intergenerational educational mobility to a rural economy characterized by farm-nonfarm occupational dualism and provide a comparative analysis of rural China and rural India. The model provides a micro-foundation for the widely used linear-in-levels...

This paper develops a micro-econometric method to account for differences across distributions of household income. Going beyond the determination of earnings in labor markets, we also estimate statistical models for occupational choice and for the conditional distributions of education,...

Cash transfers targeted to poor people, but conditional on some behavior on their part, such as school attendance or regular visits to health care facilities, are being adopted in a growing number of developing countries. Even where ex-post impact evaluations have been conducted, a number of...