Institutions, and more speci…cally private property rights, have come to be seen as a major determinant of long-run economic development. We evaluate the case for property rights as an explanatory factor of the Industrial Revolution and derive some lessons for the analysis of developing countries today. We pay particular attention to the role of property rights in the accumulation of physical c...

Thinking about population as a driver of agricultural development provides insights into induced technical and institutional change, whether it be Esther Boserup’s declining fallow period, modern crop varieties, or the specialization pyramid that arises in laborintensive agriculture. The non-convexities of research and development, infrastructure investments, and specialization imply that modes...

This paper examines whether the average level of human capital in a region affects the earnings of an individual residing in that region in a manner that is external to the individual’s own human capital. I find little evidence of an external effect of human capital, which suggests that human capital spillovers of the form postulated by the new growth literature are unlikely to matter much in p...

I study how the relative efficiency of high- and low-skill labor varies across countries. Using microdata for countries at different stages development, document that differences in quantities wages are consistent with high-skill workers being relatively more productive rich exploit variation skill premia foreign-educated migrants to discriminate between two possible drivers this pattern: cross...

The old-age security motive for fertility postulates that people’s needs support raise the demand children. We exploit extension of social pensions in Namibia during 1990s to provide a quasi-experimental quantification this widespread idea. reform eliminated inequalities pension coverage and benefits across regions ethnic groups. Combining differences pre-reform exposure cohorts, we show substa...

Online professional networking platforms are widely used and may help workers to search for obtain jobs. We run the first randomized evaluation of training work seekers join use one largest platforms, LinkedIn. Training increases end-of-program employment rate by 10 percent (7 percentage points), this effect persists at least 12 months. The available employment, platform use, job data suggest t...

Employment may be important to well-being for reasons beyond its role as an income source. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value employment in refugee camps Bangladesh. We involve 745 individuals field experiment with three arms: control arm, weekly cash and arm equal value. raises substantially more than alone, 66 percent employed are willing forgo payments continue w...

This paper examines retirement behaviour and household income for older persons in Chile. It pays close attention to the sources of household income, income inequalities, and the economic vulnerability of older persons. This is important in order to evaluate whether labour market and social security reform in Latin America will improve the welfare of older groups, and especially their vulnerabi...

Evidence from recent randomized …eld experiments on community-based monitoring reveals substantial heterogenous treatment e¤ects. Using data from a randomized experiment in primary health in Uganda, we test whether social heterogeneity can explain why some communities managed to push for better health service delivery while others did not. The results suggest that income inequality, and particu...

While privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) remains a popular policy tool in many countries, the impacts on workers are unclear. This paper studies case Brazil, which implemented large program 1990s. Following privatization, incumbent privatized SOEs suffer wage decline roughly 25 percent relative to matched control group. Additionally, private sector firms that connected by labor mob...