Survey data from urban China in 2002 show levels of life satisfaction to be low, but not exceptionally so, by international comparison. Many of the determinants of life satisfaction in urban China appear comparable to those for people in other countries. These include, inter alia, unemployment,...

In nationally representative household data from the 2008 wave of the Rural to Urban Migration in China survey, nearly two thirds of rural-urban migrants found their employment through family members, relatives, friends or acquaintances. This paper investigates why the use of social network to...

We investigate adaptation of subjective well-being using a randomised controlled trial. We find that providing medical equipment to a random sample of Ugandan adults with lower limb disabilities has a positive effect on their physical health, using both objective and self-reported measures....

We use Synthetic Control Methodology to estimate the output loss in Tunisia as a result of the "Arab spring". Our results suggest that each Tunisian citizen lost, on average, an estimated US$ 600 (5.5 percent of GDP), US$ 574 (5.1 percent of GDP) and US$ 735 (6.4 percent of GDP) in 2011, 2012...

Previous work has investigated whether political instability has a negative effect on economic growth, with mixed results, largely because political instability can take various forms. Using synthetic control methodology, which constructs a counterfactual in the absence of political instability,...

Most empirical studies on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) use cross-sectional data or case studies, making causality hard to establish. We overcome this limitation by using panel data on Chinese firms. We find no effect of last year's profits on CSR ratings, although their negative...

This paper explores the urban-rural welfare gap in 2002 and 2009/10 for the case of Sri Lanka. This was a period of high growth and falling poverty rates in the country. The paper attempts to explore three issues: (a) what are the determinants of urban and rural household welfare, (b) does the...

This paper explores the rates of return to education in Sri Lanka across the sexes and different types of employment during 2009/10. The endogeneity bias suggests that education may be associated with other characteristics such as ability and family background - excluding such attributes could...

This paper attempts to examine the labour force participation decisions and earnings across employment sectors and how it varies by gender in Sri Lanka. The labour market is disaggregated into 5 sectors - public, formal private, informal private, self-employed and agriculture. Using the Labour...

This paper evaluates the heterogeneous effect of health insurance on out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure (OOPHE), using merged data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey and Ghana Health Service reports. It applies conditional-mixed process and censored quantile instrumental variable...