Jorge M. Agüero Muhammad Farhan Majid October 2015 Abstract Previous studies have shown that wars restrict the acquisition of human capital. We expand this literature by exploring how the stock of human capital is affected by wars. Applying a “missing people” approach to the 1994 Rwanda genocide we find that the size of the educated cohort --those with completed primary school or more-shrunk by...

This paper analyses the determinants of household welfare in the Northwest region of Tanzania using microlevel cross section data. Despite having gone through a series of structural adjustment programs in the late1980s, Tanzania is still considered one of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper argues that the determinants of household welfare are numerous and complex, ranging fr...

This study attempts to quantify the links between infrastructure investment and poverty reduction using a multi-region general equilibrium model, supplemented with household survey data for the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). Infrastructure investment is an important step in economic development, with improvements in transportation infrastructure boosting economic opportunities throughout the r...

The factors behind the increase in the relative wages of skilled workers in developing countries are still not well understood. The authors use data from Peru to analyze the determinants of withinindustry share of skilled workers. They use a translog cost function for gross output and are therefore able to incorporate the effects of materials, both domestic and imported, in addition to capital....

It is the charge of economic history not only to explain the economic past, but to use it to enrich and develop economic theory (North, 1994). In paleoeconomics, theory plays the additional role of adding veracity of accounts based on sparse evidence through the demonstration of internal consistency. We synthesize pre-historical and historical evidence available from the settlement and moderniz...

This paper provides empirical evidence of an U-shaped relationship between the extent of the market (size of the relevant urban market) and the pattern of crop specialization in a village economy. We use the recent two-stage estimator developed by Lewbel (2007) and exploit heteroskedasticity for identification of the causal effects of market size. The results suggest that the portfolio of crops...

This paper offers a theoretical and empirical analysis on the sources of the narrowing gender gap in wages. Based on some existing literature, the model posits that the narrowing gender gap may be related to women’s changing comparative advantage and the gender gap is smaller in occupations in which physical labor is less intensively used. The model implies that when an economy transforms from ...

Dynamic incentives, where incentives to repay are generated by granting access to future loans, is one of the methodologies used by microfinance institutions (MFIs). In this paper, I present a model of dynamic incentives where lenders are uncertain over how much borrowers value future loans. Loan terms are determined endogenously, and loans become more favorable as the probability of default be...

The central question of this paper concerns the implications of remittance flows for migrants and their origin households in the country of origin. This paper represents the first attempt to present a disaggregated view of international remittance flows using a matched sample of international migrants and their origin families. I investigate two types of remittances: transfers to the home famil...

In this paper we examine the demand for education among rural Black households in South Africa using nationally representative data from the 1990s. In particular our study focuses on factors affecting schooling decisions at the household level. Our estimation results reveal strong evidence of a sibling synergy effect, in that the presence of other school-age children in a household makes it mor...