Though social spending facilitates risk-pooling in the impoverished regions, too many resources devoted to social occasions may impose negative externalities and hinder efforts to alleviate poverty for households living close to subsistence. Conducting three waves census-type panel survey in...

Using data from multiple sources, we show that in Bangladesh, the increase in real wages, particularly female wages, has accelerated since the late 2000s, suggesting that the Lewis turning point (the point at which the labor market starts to shift in favor of workers) has arrived in Bangladesh....

Innovations are a key driver of long-term economic growth. There has been an explosion of patent filings in China in the past three decades. But empirical studies on the pattern of innovations at the firm level are rather scant primarily due to lack of firm-specific patent data. We have made...

As sex ratio imbalances have become a problem in an increasing number of countries, it is important to understand their consequences. With the defeat of the Kuomintang Party in China, more than one million soldiers and civilians, mainly young males, retreated to Taiwan in the late 1940s....

"This paper seeks to contribute to the literature on village governance and local public goods provision. Using data from 144 village-level governments in India's Tamil Nadu state, we examine whether the gender and caste of village government leaders influence village public goods provision. In...

Though social spending facilitates risk-pooling in the impoverished regions, too many resources devoted to social occasions may impose negative externalities and hinder efforts to alleviate poverty for households living close to subsistence. Conducting three waves census-type panel survey in...

Using data from 144 village-level governments in India's Tamil Nadu state, this paper investigates political reservations for women and whether the gender of village government leaders influences the provision of village public goods. A knowledge test of village government presidents and a...

Facing scarcity of a production factor, a firm can develop technologies to either substitute the scarce factor (price effect) or complement the more abundant factors (market size effect). Whether the market size effect or the price effect dominates largely depends on the elasticity of...

The high and rising household savings rate in China is not easily reconciled with the traditional explanations that emphasize life cycle factors, the precautionary saving motive, financial development, or habit formation. This paper proposes a new competitive saving motive: As the sex ratio...

China experiences an increasingly severe relative surplus of men in the pre-marital age cohort. The existing literature on its consequences focuses mostly on negative aspects such as crime. In this paper, we provide evidence that the imbalance may also stimulate economic growth by inducing more...