Our objective is to estimate the average treatment effect (ATE) of education on earnings for African men in South Africa. Estimation of the ATE in our data is difficult because of omitted ability bias and a high degree of sample selection due to low labor force participation. Manski and Pepper...

Do markets in less-developed countries abate consequences of climate stress? Rainfall is an important factor in rice production in Indonesia. This paper uses changes in regional rice prices across the 19 residencies in less-developed Java to assess how rice markets responded to variations in...

Focused on innovation frequency of durable complementary goods, this paper shows that interdependency of innovation decisions generically gives rise to coordination failure between the producers. More importantly, the coordination failure may arise in opposite directions: Not only may the...

In this paper, we show that Ricardian equivalence does not hold in a representative agent framework if one considers goods whose current consumption affect future marginal utilities. We find that, when the intertemporal elasticity of substitution changes over time, the timing of lump sum...

This paper extends the Dincer and Eichengreen (2007) index of central bank transparency. Improvements in transparency are notable in Central and Eastern Europe, while the index has shown much smaller rises in most other parts of the world. The pattern observed by Dincer and Eichengreen,...

The political accord struck by world leaders at the United Nations negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009 allows participating countries to express their greenhouse gas commitments in a variety of ways. For example, developed countries promised different percent emissions reductions...

Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) have become one of the major ways of extracting information about the macro economy. One might cite three major uses of them in macro-econometric research. 1. For quantifying impulse responses to macroeconomic shocks. 2. For measuring the degree of...

We study a newly constructed panel data set of relative prices of a large number of consumer goods among 31 European countries. We find that there is a substantial and non-diminishing deviation from PPP at all levels of aggregation, even among eurozone members. However, real exchange rates are...

Using long historical data for Britain over the period 1620-2006, this paper seeks to explain the importance of innovative activity, population growth and other factors in inducing the transition from the Malthusian trap to the post-Malthusian growth regime. Furthermore, the paper tests the...

This paper reports estimates of the elasticity of taxable income with respect to the net-of-tax rate for New Zealand taxpayers. The elasticity of taxable income was estimated to be substantially higher for the highest income groups. Generally it was higher for men than for women. Changes in the...