Estimates of labor mobility costs are needed to assess the responses of employment and wages to trade shocks when factor adjustment is costly. Available methods to estimate those costs rely on panel data, which are seldom available in developing countries. The authors propose a method to...

This paper provides an overview of recent work on quality measurement of medical care and its correlates in four low and middle-income countries-India, Indonesia, Tanzania, and Paraguay. The authors describe two methods-testing doctors and watching doctors-that are relatively easy to implement...

The social and economic consequences of poor mental health in the developing world are presumed to be significant, yet are largely under-researched. The authors argue that mental health modules can be meaningfully added to multi-purpose household surveys in developing countries, and used to...

A model of firm innovation illustrates the effects of the threat of imitation and product varieties on a representative firm's decision to invest in research and development to produce new product varieties. The model motivates two empirical questions: (1) Is research and development partially...

"Recent research highlights the relationship between economic development and productive diversification, which may be hindered by market failures. After identifying stages of diversification in disaggregated export data, the authors develop a metric for the flows of export "discoveries," or...