Drawing upon unique transaction-level data from rural Ethiopia, this paper tests for general forms of imperfect competition among rural wholesale traders. These are key to the grain distribution system as they purchase from farmers and perform interregional trade. Tests show that traders in a typical source market engage in imperfectly competitive behavior in purchasing from farmers, driving do...

This paper examines ethnic diversity and local public goods in rural western Kenya. The identification strategy relies on the stable historically determined patterns of ethnic land settlement. Ethnic diversity is associated with lower primary school funding and worse school facilities, and there is suggestive evidence that it leads to poor water well maintenance. The theoretical model illustrat...

This paper investigates the consequences of imperfect and uneven factor market development for farm efficiency in rural China. In particular, we estimate the extent to which an inverse relationship in farm productivity can be attributed to the administrative (instead of market) allocation of land, and the extent of unevenly developed non-agricultural opportunities. Using a recently collected ho...

This paper delivers empirical evidence on how informal transfers are aff ected by a formal and country-wide health insurance scheme. Using the fi fth wave of the Ghanaian Living Standard Household Survey, we investigate the extent to which the exogenous implementation of the National Health Insurance Scheme aff ects the probability of making or receiving informal transfers and their monetary eq...

Does Gender Matter for Firm Performance? Evidence from Eastern Europe and Central Asia Using 2005 firm level data for 26 ECA countries, this paper estimates performance gaps between maleand female-owned businesses, while controlling for their location by industry and country. We find that female entrepreneurs have significantly smaller scale of operations (as measured by sales revenues) and are...

Employers around the world complain that youth lack the soft skills needed for success in the workplace. In response, a number of employment programs have begun to incorporate soft skills training, but to date there has been little evidence as to the effectiveness of such programs. This paper reports on a randomized experiment in Jordan in which female community college graduates were randomly ...

Incentives for Teacher Relocation: Evidence from the Gambian Hardship Allowance We evaluate the impact of the Gambian hardship allowance, which provides a salary premium of 30-40% to primary school teachers in remote locations, on the distribution and characteristics of teachers across schools. A geographic discontinuity in the policy’s implementation and the presence of common pre-treatment tr...

Theories suggesting either static or dynamic productivity gains derived from exports often assume the prior existence of a perfect market. In the presence of market failure, however, the competition effect and the resource reallocation effect of exports on productive efficiency may be greatly reduced; and there may actually be disincentives for innovation. This paper analyses the impact of expo...

This paper provides a critique of the global crusade recently launched by the World Bank and World Health Organization against tobacco, by providing some welfare estimates of the net costs associated from the rise in taxes that is proposed for India, S.Africa, S.Korea, Japan and the European Union. It critically examines conventional studies of the costs-benefits of smoking which besides ignori...

A dynamic model is presented of a household’s joint production, storage, and trade decisions under price risk, region-wide and idiosyncratic yield risk, and explicit transaction costs. Balancing the goals of profit maximization and hedging against consumption price risk, grain management decisions are nonlinear, interdependent functions of the market price and household grain availability and f...