Raising school enrollment, like economic development in general, takes a long time. This is partly because, as a mountain of empirical evidence now shows, economic conditions and slowly- changing parental education levels determine children’s school enrollment to a greater degree than...

The emigration of highly skilled workers can in theory lower social welfare in the migrant-sending country. If such workers produce a good whose consumption conveys a positive externality—such as nurses and doctors in a very poor country—the loss can be greater, and welfare can even decline...

Past research on aid and growth is flawed because it typically examines the impact of aggregate aid on growth over a short period, usually four years, while significant portions of aid are unlikely to affect growth in such a brief time. We divide aid into three categories: (1) emergency and...

Does the emigration of highly-skilled workers deplete local human capital? The answer is not obvious if migration prospects induce human capital formation. We analyze a unique natural quasi-experiment in the Republic of the Fiji Islands, where political shocks have provoked one of the largest...

We compare the wages of workers inside the United States to the wages of observably identical workers outside the United States—controlling for country of birth, country of education, years of education, work experience, sex, and ruralurban residence. This is made possible by new and uniquely...

The authors study one high-profile case: the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), an experimental and intensive package intervention to spark sustained local economic development in rural Africa. They illustrate the benefits of rigorous impact evaluation in this setting by showing that estimates...

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to investigate the risk and return characteristics of dividend investing compared to a passive “market” approach and provide probable explanations for any differences in return and risk. Design/methodology/approach – The research design is a...

Labor markets are increasingly global. Overseas work can enrich households but also split them geographically, with ambiguous net effects on decisions about work, investment, and education. These net effects, and their mechanisms, are poorly understood. We study a policy discontinuity in the...

This study uses a unique natural experiment to test a simple model of international differences in workers’ wages and productivity. Large differences in wages across countries could arise from several sources. These include barriers to trade in outputs, differences in technology, differences...