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...

Using detailed household-farm level data from Malawi, we measure real farm total factor productivity (TFP) controlling for a wide array of factor inputs, land quality, and transitory shocks. The distribution of farm TFP has substantial dispersion but factor inputs are roughly evenly spread among...

In this paper, we employ both calibration and modern (Bayesian) estimation methods to assess the role of neutral and investment-specific technology shocks in generating fluctuations in hours. Using a neoclassical stochastic growth model, we show how answers are shaped by the identification...

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...

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....

We use new and unique nationally-representative panel ISA data for Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda to explore the degree of consumption insurance in Sub-Saharan Africa. Partly, our contribution is to construct accurate and consistent measures of consumption and income across time and space for these...

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...