This paper examines the ways in which lower-income households obtain basic financial services in urban communities in Mexico and the United States. And it discusses the efforts that private sector and government organizations are making to lower the cost or improve the quality of those services....

The author focuses on how urban policies and the clustering of creative industries has influenced urban outcomes. The set of creative industries include those with output protectable under some form of intellectual property law. More specifically, this sub-sector encompasses software,...

This paper presents a novel framework to estimate the elasticity between nighttime lights and quarterly economic activity. The relationship is identified by accounting for varying degrees of measurement errors in nighttime light data across countries. The elasticity is 1.55 for emerging markets...

The impact of macroeconomic crises on parents' investments in the human capital of their children is a widely contested issue. The author analyzes the effects of the profound macroeconomic crisis in Peru in 1988-92 on the schooling and employment decisions made by urban school-age children. He...

Empirical studies on health at a disaggregate level-by socioeconomic group or geographic location-can provide useful information for designing poverty-focused interventions. Using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data, the author investigates the determinants of health outcomes in low-income...

This study investigates the impact of the Golden Quadrilateral highway project on the urban and rural growth of Indian manufacturing. The Golden Quadrilateral project upgraded the quality and width of 5,846 km of roads in India. The study uses a difference-in-difference estimation strategy to...

Why is the urban-rural gap in child malnutrition increasing in Peru despite government efforts to improve the provision of public services? To answer this question, the impact of regional public expenditure in Peru on young children's nutritional outcomes is examined. To account for policy...

The author tests how the local economic structure-measured by a region's sector specialization, competition, and diversity-affects the technological growth of manufacturing sectors. Most of the empirical literature on this topic assumes that in the long run more productive regions will attract...