Despite the evidence for high returns to education at an individual level, large increases in education across the developing world have brought disappointing returns in aggregate. This paper shows that the same pattern holds in India by building aggregates from micro-data so that the...

While it is common to use income uncertainty to explain household saving decisions, there is much disagreement about the importance of precautionary saving. This paper suggests that income uncertainty is not an important motive for saving, although households do have other precautionary reasons...

Nominal wage stickiness is an important component of recent medium-scale structural macroeconomic models, but to date there has been little microeconomic evidence supporting the as- sumption of sluggish nominal wage adjustment. We present evidence on the frequency of nominal wage adjustment...

Although many view financial access as a means of reducing poverty or increasing growth, empirical studies have produced contradictory results. One problem is that most studies cover only a short time frame and do not consider dynamic effects. I show that introducing credit creates a boom in...

What financial services matter for growth? This paper examines the effects national banks had on growth in the United States from 1870-1900. These banks were commercial not investment banks: they made short term loans and could not take land as collateral. I use the discontinuity in entry caused...

Credit limit variability is a crucial aspect of the consumption, savings, and debt decisions of households in the United States. Using a large panel this paper first demonstrates that individuals gain and lose access to credit frequently and often have their credit limits reduced unexpectedly....

This paper examines the changing distribution of where women and girls live in India at the smallest scale possible: India's nearly 600,000 villages. The village level variation in the proportion female is far larger than the variation across districts. Decomposing the variance, I show that...

Two thirds of all Indian women have migrated for marriage, around 300 million women, but little is known about this vast migration. This paper provides a detailed accounting of the puzzlingly large migration of Indian women and evaluates its causes. Contrary to conventional wisdom, marriage...

By 1989 the Michigan Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) had experienced approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership. We study the effect of this attrition on the unconditional distributions of several socioeconomic variables and on the...

It is widely known that when there are negative moving average errors, a high order augmented autoregression is necessary for unit root tests to have good size, but that information criteria such as the AIC and BIC tend to select a truncation lag that is very small. Furthermore, size distortions...