Diversifying into non-farm activities has been suggested as an effective way out of poverty for rural households in developing countries. Using the Vietnamese Household Living Standards Surveys of 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008, we test this claim, and investigate the effect of non-farm sector...

We find a robust relationship between motor vehicle ownership, its interaction with legal heritage and obesity in OECD countries. Our estimates indicate that an increase of 100 motor vehicles per thousand residents is associated with about a 6% point increase in obesity in common law countries,...

Using product-level trade data, we empirically investigate the export patterns of more than 150 countries in their exports to the U.S., Brazil, India and Japan. We document strong evidence that exporters specialize according to their relative factor endowments, technology, and economic size....

This paper examines the applicability of Zipf's law to tourism. It is established that a variation of this law holds in this case--a rank-size rule with concavity. Due to this non-linearity, it is shown that a spline regression provides an extremely convenient tool for predicting tourist...

This paper investigates differences between the educational attainment of immigrants, children of immigrants and native-born individuals in Australia by using Australian Youth Survey (AYS) data combined with aggregate Australian Census data. Differences in educational attainment are decomposed...

The effect of credit constraints on the dropout, graduate and slow finishing decisions of university students in Australia is studied. The Australian university system has institutions in place to resolve credit constraint issues, including an income contingent loan scheme and means tested...

We study cross‐country differences in rural and urban educational attainment by using a data set for a diverse group of 56 countries. Utilizing human capital, labor market and migration theories, we identify national, rural and urban factors that are expected to influence rural and urban...

We study the rural-urban divide in educational attainment in a cross-country setting. In order to do this, we present a newly constructed cross-country data set measuring average educational attainment in rural and urban regions of 56 countries. This data set is used to study the sources of...

We compare a uniform voucher regime against the status quo mix of public and private education, focusing on the distribtuion of welfare gains and losses across households by income. We argue that the topping-up option available under uniform vouchers is not su¢ ciently valuable for the poorer...