This paper examines whether disease burdens, especially prevalent in the tropics, contribute significantly to widening gender gaps in educational attainments. We estimate the impact of sudden exposure to the 1986 meningitis epidemic in Niger on girls’ education relative to boys. Our results suggest that increases in meningitis cases during epidemic years significantly reduce years of education ...

Institutions that rely on joint liability to facilitate lending to the poor have a long history and are now a common feature of many developing countries. Economists have proposed several theories of joint-liability lending that stress various aspects of its informational and enforcement advantages over other forms of lending. This paper analyzes how joint-liability lending promotes screening, ...

It is often argued that multinationals are reluctant to transfer technology due to the fear of spillovers. We show that this need not be the case if host country policies like taxation are taken into account. Furthermore, we examine the incentives the multinational and the host country have to engage in an international joint venture. We show why a multinational may agree to enter a joint ventu...

Most risk-sharing tests on developing country data are conducted at the level of the village; generally, the full risk-sharing hypothesis is rejected. This paper uses detailed data on all insurance networks within a village in Tanzania; networks are not clustered but largely overlapping. We test whether full risk-sharing occurs within these networks. While village level full-insurance cannot be...

Can we identify the members of a community who are bestplaced to diffuse information simply by asking a random sample of individuals? We show that boundedly-rational individuals can, simply by tracking sources of gossip, identify those who are most central in a network according to “diffusion centrality,” which nests other standard centrality measures. Testing this prediction with data from 35 ...

Abstract Background Infectious Mononucleosis (IM) is a common viral illness among adolescents and young adults. While most cases are self-limiting, small number of patient can develop life threatening complications, such as atraumatic splenic rupture (ASR). This rare but serious sequelae, the commonest cause associated mortality. Epstein Barr Virus commonly with IM, concurrent infection cytomeg...

We construct the string states |OJ p >J , |OJ1 q >J1J2 and |O12 0 >J1J2 in the Hilbert space of the quantum mechanical orbifold model so as to calculate the three point functions and the matrix elements of the light-cone Hamiltonian from the interacting string bit model. With these string states we show that the three point functions and the matrix elements of the Hamiltonian derived from the i...