Islamic banks, as their charters require, should share their profits and losses with their customers through equity financing; but they do mark-up financing instead, which is similar to bank loans. Theoretically, one of the reasons is Islamic banks operate in poor contracting environments where...

This paper examines the effect of publishing hospital charges on healthcare costs. We compare hospital charges before and after Singapore's Ministry of Health started publishing the statistics of hospital charges on its website in the late 2003. We do not find evidence of a decrease in...

This paper examines the effects of a longer school year in Indonesia on grade repetition, educational attainment, employability, and earnings. I exploit an arbitrary rule that assigned students to a longer school year in Indonesia in 1978-1979, which fits a fuzzy regression discontinuity design....

I examine whether family hardship experienced by owners of micro and small firms affects the firms' growth. Based on a representative sample of owners of firms in Indonesia, and using deaths of owners' family members as a measure of hardship, I estimate the effects of family hardship on firms'...

Both theoretically and empirically, childbearing decreases labour supply of females, but few papers examine the effect of children on whether women emigrate to work. Using exogenous variations in family size induced by parents’ preferences for mixed sibling-sex composition in instrumental...

We examine the effects of parental emigration from Sri Lanka on the education of the migrants' children left behind. Using access to foreign-employment agencies at community level as an instrument for migration in two-stage least squares estimations, we do not find parental migration matters on...

This paper examines whether education empowers women. We exploit an exogenous variation in education induced by a longer school year in Indonesia in 1978, which fits a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. We find education reduces the number of live births, increases contraceptive use, and...

This paper examines the effects of trade on economic growth and growth volatility. Using the 1967-1975 closure of the Suez Canal as an instrument for trade, I find that trade leads to higher economic growth, and lower probability of recession or economic slowdown. There is no evidence that trade...

We examine what happens to Sri Lankan men’s labour supply when their wives emigrate to work and leave the husbands and children at home—the effects of maternal migration on the husbands’ labour supply. Using sibling sex-composition of a household as an instrumental variable for the...

We examine the effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities on the values of firms. Using a non-parametric regression discontinuity design, exploiting a natural experiment induced by India’s Companies Act 2013, we find investors devalue the stocks of firms that do CSR activities...