In the standard Harris–Todaro framework, migration flows arise as disequilibrium driven movements of the population. It is the purpose of this research to modify the simple dualistic model in order to account for the existence of permanent migrants, i.e., of individuals who work in another country without changing their original nationality. Or, in the rural–urban interpretation of the model, o...

Trust beliefs are heterogeneous across individuals and, at the same time, persistent across generations. We investigate one mechanism yielding these dual patterns: false consensus. In the context of a trust game experiment, we show that individuals extrapolate from their own type when forming trust beliefs about the same pool of potential partners i.e., more (less) trustworthy individuals form ...

There is substantial interest in development policies related to international migration from developing countries. In the last decade, there has been a wave of rigorous empirical studies (many of which are randomized controlled trials) quantifying the impacts of such policies. This article examines evidence on the impacts of policies in five areas: 1) migration facilitation, 2) migrant educati...

We investigate whether Egyptian mothers display son preference in their breastfeeding behaviour, given the trade off between the protective effects of breastfeeding and its contraceptive properties. We also examine how intensity of exposure to gender-biased parental investments before childbirth affects maternal nursing behaviour, exploiting exogenous variation in mothers’ age at premarital gen...

Using the 2004-05 India Human Development Survey data, we estimate and decompose the earnings of household businesses owned by Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SCSTs) and non-SCSTs across the earnings distribution. We find clear differences in characteristics between the two types of businesses with the former faring significantly worse. The mean decomposition reveals that as much as 55 percent of ...

Why is income inequality higher in Latin America than in East Asia? Is this phenomenon related to the region’s natural resource abundance? Is it a contributor to Latin America’s slow and narrowly focused human capital accumulation? If so, can anything be done to reverse the Latin American trends, or should we think of the region’s fate as unalterable? To help answer these questions, this paper ...

High performing nursing teams deliver quality safe care that is valuable to a country. In order to successfully perform tasks, there needs to be a proper mix of team composition in terms of team knowledge and team skills. Also, the team must work in a good surrounding through a positive team context. Team context, in the form of team identification and team support, provides the necessary work ...

The goal of the World Bank is ‘a world free of poverty’ but the most widely used poverty measures do not show when poverty might be eliminated. The ‘head-count index’ simply counts the poor, while the ‘poverty gap index’ shows their average shortfall from the poverty line. Neither measure reflects changes in the distribution of incomes amongst the poor, but squaring the poverty gap brings sensi...

Using UNESCO’s recent data, the effects of a country’s income and ‘tropicality’ on ‘school life expectancy’ are explored. While the effect of income is, as expected, positive and substantial, the distance from the equator, which is a measure of the country’s tropicality, is also important. Two additional points are noted. First, the effect of tropicality, relative to that of income, is larger i...

Child Labor and Schooling Response to Changes in Coca Production in Rural Peru Coca eradication and interdiction are the most common policies aimed at reducing the production and distribution of cocaine in the Andes, but little is known about their impact on households. This paper uses the shift in the production of coca leaves from Peru to Colombia in 1995 to analyze the indirect effects of th...