While household-level inequality is well-documented for a large set of industrialized economies, little is known about the same distributional facts of consumption, income and wealth in developing countries, in particular, for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This paper works toward closing this gap....

During a war, the Commercial Elites are able to withhold resources from the King. If a defensive war is lost the King is replace by an alternate. The threat of losing such a war may lead the King to hand over power to the Commercial Elites in exchange of financial support to defend the country....

This paper develops a model of HIV diffusion among heterosexual individuals who choose (i) whether to engage in sex, i.e. the source of potential infection, (ii) the nature of their relationship as measured by the endogenous rate of partnership destruction, (iii) the presence of extra-marital...

Our premilinary findings suggest that the elasticity of substitution between skill groups displays a large tilted inverse-S pattern. The elasticity slowly raises from 1975 to early 1990s about 3-4 times its original value, and slowly declines to its original value until it abruptly rises again...

We assess the importance of land misallocation for productivity in agriculture using a quantitative model and detailed household-level data from Malawi. The land market is largely underdeveloped in Malawi as the vast majority of land is transmitted by inheritance, almost none of the land is...

We construct a panel data of income and consumption of Chinese households from 1989 to 2009 from the publicly available China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS). We use the Nutrition Survey from the CHNS, that has a detailed account of the dietary information at the household level, to construct...

To explore the quantitative implications that AIDS has for the development path of the Sub- Saharan African economies, I extend a standard theory of economic development that reproduces the process of industrialization, Hansen and Prescott (2002), with a population model that relates the age...

In this paper, we use an extended version of the neoclassical multi-country growth model to explore the efficiency in the allocation of physical capital across countries. In our framework, the observed marginal product of capital (MPK) can differ across countries because of two different...

Under the identification strategy that only innovations to productivity can have a permanent impact on labor productivity, Gali (1999) finds that the contribution of productivity shocks to aggregate fluctuations is negligible. More recently, Fisher (2006) extends Galis's identification to allow...

This paper studies the growth of countries at comparable "states of development". Using data on income levels, structural transformation, political institutions and demographic and human capital levels, we define the state of development of each country in each point in time. Then, we estimate...