We analyze peer e¤ects in sleeping behavior using a representative sample of U.S. teenagers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health. The sampling design of the survey causes the conventional 2SLS estimator to be inconsistent. We extend the NLS estimator in Wang and Lee...

We estimate how random weather fluctuations affected infant mortality across 28 African countries in the past, combining high-resolution data from retrospective fertility surveys (DHS) and climate-model reanalysis (ERA-40). We find that infants were much more likely to die when exposed in utero...

This Paper takes a broader look at how vertical linkages can trigger the spatial agglomeration of economic activity in a ‘new economic geography’ (NEG) set-up. First, it formally establishes the key positive features of a wide class of vertical-linkage models without resorting to numerical...

In this paper, we show that strategic complementarities--such as firm-specific factors or quasi-kinked demand--have crucial implications for the design of monetary policy and for the welfare costs of output and inflation variability. Recent research has mainly used log-linear approximations to...

We review a recent body of theoretical work that aims to put numbers on the consequences of globalization. A unifying theme of our survey is methodological. We rely on gravity models and demonstrate how they can be used for counterfactual analysis. We highlight how various economic...

This paper provides evidence on household responses to the relaxation of one barrier constraining adoption of health practices - lack of information - in a resource constrained setting. It examines the effects of a randomized intervention in Malawi which provides mothers with information on...

Drought is Africa’s primary natural disaster and a pervasive source of income risk for poor households. This paper documents the long-run health effects of early life exposure to drought and investigates an important source of heterogeneity in these effects. Combining birth cohort variation in...

Counterfeit and sub-standard antimalarial drugs present a growing threat to public health. This paper investigates the mechanisms that determine the prevalence of fake antimalarial drugs in local markets, their effects, and potential interventions to combat the problem. We collect drug samples...

This paper studies how patent rights and price regulation affect how fast new drugs are launched in different countries, using newly constructed data on launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries for the period 1983-2002, and information on the duration and content of patent and price control...

Self-reported data on sexual behaviors have been criticized to be unreliable. In recent studies, risky sexual behaviors have therefore been measured using biomarkers for curable sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Nevertheless, no previous research have tested how reliable such data are. In...