This paper examines the importance of factor mobility within countries for the manifestation of agglomeration and location effects emphasized in the new economic geography literature. Working with a model of trade under monopolistic competition, the relationship of factor mobility (in particular labor) to industry adjustment and relocation is developed analytically, and then illustrated with a ...

We estimate the role of peer effects in technology adoption using data from a randomized distribution of menstrual cups in Nepal. Using individual randomization, we estimate causal effects of peer exposure on adoption. We find strong evidence of peer effects: two months after distribution, one additional friend with access to the menstrual cup increases usage by 18.6 percentage points. Using th...

Household diversification into nonfarm work activities is a major rural livelihood strategy in many developing economies. In this paper, we explore empirically if rural households in Uganda leverage their nonfarm earnings to overcome credit constraints and invest in high yielding maize seed varieties. We use a semiparametric estimator of binary outcomes that accommodates endogenous regressors s...

How does commodity price volatility affect the welfare of rural households in developing countries, for whom hedging and consumption smoothing are often difficult? And when governments choose to intervene in order to stabilize commodity prices, as they often do, who gains the most? This paper develops an analytical framework and an empirical strategy to answer those questions, along with illust...

We compare the rationality of choice under risk – utility maximization, stochastic dominance, and expected-utility maximization – of students from one of the best universities in the US and one of the best universities in Africa. The US subjects came nearer to consistency with utility maximization and the dominance principle, but there are no differences between the two samples in consistency w...

In this paper we compare the two standard forms of international investments in developing countries, debt and foreign direct investment, from a finance perspective. It is shown that the sovereign risks associated with debt finance are generally less severe than the ones which come with FDI. FDI is chosen only if the foreign investor is more efficient in running the project, if the project is r...

We combine household survey data with event data on the timing and location of armed conflicts to examine the impact of Burundi’s civil war on children’s health status. The identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in the war’s timing across provinces and the exposure of children’s birth cohorts to the fighting. After controlling for province of residence, birth cohort, individual an...

Is the Quantity-Quality Trade-off a Trade-off for All, None, or Some? Although the theoretical trade-off between the quantity and quality of children is wellestablished, empirical evidence supporting such a causal relationship − particularly on child health − is limited. We use two measures of child health to asses the quantity-quality tradeoff across the entire distribution. Using data from th...

The following notes contain a computer simulation concerning a basic nonWalrasian equilibrium system, following the Edmond Malinvaud “short side” approach, as far as the price adjustment is concerned, and the sequential Hicksian “weeks” structure with regard of the temporal characterization. Two strongly heterogeneous classes of agents will be taken into consideration: the “rich” and the “poor”...

We present unitary and sharing rule models of the household that explicitly account for three parental concerns that may lead to gender bias in the allocation of resources to children—equity, efficiency, and preferences. Deaton’s test of the effect of household composition on adult good expenditures is employed using data on fathers’ and mothers’ nutrient intake from the China Health and Nutrit...