Millions of ultra-poor households in sub-Saharan Africa rely exclusively on savings groups to meet their financial needs. However, the ability of savings groups to fully meet these needs remains unclear. We randomly assign ultra-poor Ugandan households to savings groups containing different proportions of ultra-poor members. We find evidence that groups may be unable to satisfy the borrowing ne...

War and Stature: Growing Up During the Nigerian Civil War The Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 was precipitated by secession of the Igbo-dominated southeastern region to create the state of Biafra. It was the first civil war in Africa, the predecessor of many. We investigate the legacies of this war four decades later. Using variation across ethnicity and cohort, we identify significant long run i...

In a polygamous society, all monogamous women are virtually at risk of polygamy. However, both the anthropological and economic literature are silent on the potential impact of the risk of polygamy on economic decisions of monogamous wives. We explore this issue for Senegal using individual panel data. We first estimate a Cox model for the probability of transition to polygamy. Second, we estim...

This study estimates the impact of an American rural public health program on child mortality over 1908 to 1933. Due to the absence of sanitation and childoriented health services outside of urban areas, public and private agencies sponsored county-level health departments (CHDs) throughout the US. Variation in the location and timing of the CHDs identifies improvements in population health, wh...

Many efforts are currently made to increase the limited capacity of Li-ion batteries using carbonaceous anodes. The way to reach this goal is to move to nano-structured material because the larger surface to volume ratio of particles and the reduction of the electron and Li path length implies a larger specific capacity. Additionally, nano-particles can accommodate such a dilatation/contraction...

This article offers a theory of economic growth, stagnation, and demo-economic transition that originates from external effects of childbearing, health expenditure, and education under endogenous mortality. Facing a hierarchy of needs, parents always consume and want to have a family. Child quality, measured as a two-dimensional vector of child health and schooling, becomes only affordable when...

Health conditions and disease environmentsare important for economic outcomes.This paper argues that the main impact of disease environmentson the economic developmentof nations is not due to the direct effect of health conditions on income, but rather because of their indirect effect via institutions. Health does affect income directly, but this can explain only a small fraction of today’s dif...

This paper provides a micro-level evidence that ...nancial development impacts growth by reducing ...nancing constraints that would otherwise restrict e¢cient ...rm investment. I estimate a structural model based on the Euler equation for investment using ...rm-level data from 40 countries. I ...nd a strong negative relationship between the extent of ...nancial market development, and the sensi...

We show that although the prominent centrality measures in network analysis make use of different information about nodes’ positions, they all process that information in a very restrictive and identical way. They all spring from a common family that are characterized by the same axioms. In particular, they are all based on a additively separable and linear treatment of a statistic that capture...

Poverty remains one of the most pressing problems facing the world. In this paper, I review evidence suggesting that poverty has particular neurobiological consequences, and that these consequences in turn lead to suboptimal economic behaviors which exacerbate and perpetuate poverty. Speci cally, I argue that poverty raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol, causes dysregulation and altered...