This is a pioneering study of the determinants of the subjective well-being of ethnic minority people in rural China, using a specially designed sample survey relating to 2011.  The underlying hypothesis is that the lifestyle and attitudes of ethnic minorities contribute to their happiness. ...

We experimentally investigate the extent to which social obervability of one's actions and the possibility of social non-monetary judgment affect the decision to engage in rule breaking behavior.  We consider three rule bfeaking scenarios - theft, bribery and embezzlement - in the absence of...

In real-life, individuals are often assigned to binary treatments according to existing treatment protocols.  Such protocols, when designed with “taste-based†motives, would be productively inefficient in that the expected returns to treatment for the marginal treatment recipient...

High-profile universities often face public criticism for undermining academic merit and promoting social elitism/engineering through their admissions-process. In this paper, we develop an empirical test for whether access to selective universities is meritocratic. We assume that students who...

We provide cogent evidence for the causal pro-trade effect of migrants and in doing so establish an important link between migrant networks and long-run economic development.  To this end, we exploit a unique event in human history, the exodus of the Vietnamese Boat People to the US.  This...

This paper evaluates whether immigration can mitigate the Dutch disease effects associated with booms in natural resource sectors.  We derive predicted changes in the size of the non-tradable sector from a small general-equilibrium model a la Obstfeld-Rogoff.  Using data for Canadian...

Does emigration really drain human capital accumulation in origin countries? This paper explores a unique household survey designed and conducted to answer this specific question for the case of Cape Verde - the sub-Saharan African country with the largest fraction of tertiary-educated...

Joining the EU is a natural experiment that drastically opens the borders of richer European countries to immigration.  However, migration flows from southern Europe responded little to  free migration after 1986, despite substantial differentials in real GDP per worker.  The simple...

We report on a randomized field experiment using price incentives to address both economic and gender inequality in land tenure formalization.  During the 1990s and 2000s, nearly two dozen African countries proposed de jure land reforms extending access to formal, freehold land tenure to...

While the impact of globalization on income inequality has received a lot of attention, little is known about its effect on the gender wage gap (GWG).  This study argues that there is a systematic difference in the GWG between exporting firms and non-exporters.  By the virtue of being exposed...