Human Capital, Economic Growth, and Inequality in China China’s rapid growth was fueled by substantial physical capital investments applied to a large stock of medium skilled labor acquired before economic reforms began. As development proceeded, the demand for high skilled labor has grown, and, in the past decade, China has made substantial investments in producing it. The egalitarian access t...

Estimates of the benefits of malaria reduction derived from countries that eradicated the disease are not necessarily applicable to sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria incidence and mortality is high and all eradication attempts were unsuccessful. This paper estimates the effects of malaria on schooling using geographic and survey data from Ethiopia. I show that self-reported malaria is highly co...

This paper contributes to the literature on temporary migration by developing and solving a model of repeated circular migration that accounts for saving behavior. Using Mexican Migrant Project data on undocumented migrants and non-migrants, I estimate the parameters of the model through the Method of Simulated Moments. The intensity of U.S. border enforcement is found to have a significant pos...

Migration decision-making in developing economies is addressed from the perspective of status in the labor force (unemployed or unemployed) and traditional concerns with utility maximization are expanded to include the role of assets and access to capital markets. A dynamic model is formulated and the results reveal that the migration mechanism is efficient when workers have access to borrowing...

We study the determinants of international migration with special attention to the role of institutional factors other than economic and demographic fundamentals. We evaluate the impact of political institutions and of those institutions specifically targeted at attracting migrants. For a dataset on 19th century migration, we find that economic and demographic differentials play a major role, b...

Despite the growing importance of privatization in economic reform programs, little is known about its empirical effects on wages. Using individual-level data from Mexico, I estimate the effects of privatization on industry wages in four cases: the commercial airlines, Teléfonos de México, Siderúrgica Mexicana, and the commercial banks. I find that: (1) privatization is associated with statisti...

What Explains the Stagnation of Female Labor Force Participation in Urban India? We study the surprisingly low level and stagnation of female labor force participation rates in urban India between 1987 and 2009. Despite rising growth, fertility decline, and rising wages and education levels, women’s labor force participation stagnated at around 18%. Using five large cross-sectional micro survey...

Disadvantaged students perform differentially worse when randomly given a financially salient mathematics exam. For with socioeconomic indicators below the national median, 10 percentage point increase in share of monetary themed questions depresses exam performance by 0.026 standard deviations, about 6 percent their gap. Using question-level data, I confirm role financial salience comparing on...