Can communal heterogeneity explain persistent educational inequities in developing countries? The paper uses a novel data-set from rural Pakistan that explicitly recognizes the geographic structure of villages and the social makeup of constituent hamlets to show that demand for schooling is...

This paper considers the welfare and distributional consequences of higher relative food prices in rural India through the lens of a specific-factors, general equilibrium, trade model applied at the district level. The evidence shows that nominal wages for manual labor both within and outside...

Despite large amounts invested in rural roads in developing countries, little is known about their benefits. This paper derives an expression for the willingness-to-pay for a reduction in transport costs from the canonical agricultural household model and uses it to estimate the benefits of a...

In a setting where husbands wield considerable coercive power, forms of marriage should adapt to protect the interests of women and their families. The authors study the pervasive marriage custom of watta satta in rural Pakistan, a bride exchange between families coupled with a mutual threat of...

Although sharecropping has long fascinated economists, the determinants of this contractual form are still poorly understood and the debate over the extent of moral hazard is far from settled. The authors address both issues by emphasizing the role of landlord supervision. When tenant effort is...

Monsoon rainfall is a key driver of economic life in rural Nepal as well as a major source of income variability. In this paper, the authors use a newly collected 3-year panel data set, representative of rural Nepal, merged with global monthly precipitation data to investigate the nature of the...

To quantify contracting distortions in a real‐world market, we develop and structurally estimate a model of contracting under payoff uncertainty in the south Indian groundwater economy. Uncertainty arises from unpredictable fluctuations in groundwater supply during the agricultural dry season....

The effect of weather shocks on children's anthropometrics is investigated using the two most recent rounds of the Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey. For this purpose, climate data for each survey cluster are interpolated using daily weather-station records from the national network. The...