In a world with volatile food prices, countries have an incentive to shelter their populations from induced real income shocks. When some agents are net food producers while others are net consumers, there is scope for insurance between the two groups. A domestic social protection scheme would...

This paper analyzes theoretically and empirically the impact of comparative advantage in international trade on fertility. It builds a model in which industries differ in the extent to which they use female relative to male labor and countries are characterized by Ricardian comparative advantage...

This paper compares redistribution through trade restrictions versus domestic lump-sum transfers. When preferences are non-homothetic, even domestic lump-sum transfers affect relative prices. Thus, contrary to the conventional wisdom, domestic lump-sum transfers are not necessarily superior to...

The authors analyze the interaction between a country's world market integration and its attitude towards gender roles. They discuss both theoretically and empirically how female empowerment is a source of comparative advantage that shapes a country's response to trade opening. Reciprocally, the...

The differences in financial systems between industrial and developing countries are pronounced. It has been observed, both theoretically and empirically, that the differences in countries' financial systems are a source of comparative advantage in trade. Do and Levchenko point out that to the...

Accurately measuring oil production in low-governance contexts is an important task. Many terrorist organizations and insurgencies-including the Islamic State group, also known as ISIL/ISIS or Daesh-tap oil as a revenue source. Understanding spatial and temporal variation in production in their...

In many developing countries, environmental quality remains low and policies to improve it have been inconsistently effective. This paper conducts a case study of environmental policy, focusing on an unprecedented ruling by the Supreme Court of India, which targeted industrial pollution in the...

During the Vietnam War, more than 70 million liters of military herbicide were sprayed over the combat zone. This study uses self and proxy-reported data on cancer status obtained from a nationally representative health survey of the Vietnamese population (N=158,019), combined with measures of...

The authors survey the recent literature on the mental health effects of conflict. They highlight the methodological challenges faced in this literature, which include the lack of validated mental health scales in a survey context, the difficulties in measuring individual exposure to conflict,...

Piracy off the coast of Somalia took the world by surprise when, within a six-year span (2005-2011), as many as 1,099 ships were attacked, among which more than 200 were successfully hijacked. In 2012 however, attacks had plummeted with no new hijacking reported between 2013 and mid-2015. The...