Disease and Development Revisited Acemoglu and Johnson (2007) present evidence that improvements in population health do not promote economic growth. We show that their result depends critically on the assumption that initial health has no causal effect on subsequent economic growth. We argue that such an effect is likely, primarily because childhood health affects adult productivity. In our au...

We examine the effect of rainfall shocks on crimes against women using data from 583 Indian districts for 2002-2007. We find that a one standard deviation decline in annual rainfall from the local mean increases reported domestic violence by 4.4 percent and dowry deaths by 7.8 percent. Wet shocks have no apparent effect. These patterns are consistent with consumption smoothing by households rel...

The province of Aceh in Indonesia provides a promising case for studying the economic legacy effects conflict given subnational district-level data on violence and gross domestic product. We demonstrate specific negative armed despite general peace dividend: whilst all districts grow faster after ends 2005 than during conflict, that suffered relatively more from war slowly peacetime experienced...

the main objective of this study is to investigate the production factors productivity in large manufacturing sub-sectors. for this purpose, using statistical data for period 1972-2004, we have tried to study and analyze the trend and level of production factors productivity (partial and total productivity) in each sub-sectors classified according to isic two digits code. the average and margin...

We assess the merits of different education systems in a framework that accounts for the joint decision problem of parents regarding fertility and education. Specifically, we compare the implications of a public and a private schooling regime for economic growth and inequality. We find that private schooling leads to higher growth when there is little inequality in human capital endowments acro...

This paper examines the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on growth by focusing on the complementarities between FDI inflows and financial markets. In our earlier work, we find that FDI is beneficial for growth only if the host country has well-developed financial institutions. In this paper, we investigate whether this effect operates through factor accumulation and/or improvements in ...

Market distortions can lead to resource misallocation, which can further lead to inefficiency. Throughout the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, qualitative evidence of various sources of distortion abounds. No study, however, has quantified the inefficiency in the slave trade due to these distortions. We use a structural approach to identify the dispersion of distortions in the slave t...