Productivity varies greatly among farmers and the source of that variation is not fully understood. Using a unique Indian household survey, we estimate peer effects on agricultural revenue. Results show that 60% of farmers' revenue is explained by peers. Input expenditures and land allocation to...

There is a well-known debate about the roles of geography versus institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross-country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity cannot...

In a careful and thorough empirical study, Christopher Udry (1996) shows convincingly that, in a large sample of West African households, household resource allocations were not Pareto efficient. This paper argues that observation of the Pareto inefficiency of a household resource allocation...

We use the differences between life satisfaction and emotional well-being of employed and unemployed persons to analyze how a person’s employment status affects cognitive well-being. Our results show that unemployment has a negative impact on cognitive, but not on affective well-being, which...

I critically review recent studies that estimate those costs of violence and conflict that can emerge among organized political groupings, from states, religious and ethnic organizations to guerillas and paramilitaries. The review includes studies that estimate direct and indirect costs due to...

Little work has been done on the biological conditions for the US Central Plains. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, black and white statures in Nebraska increased with economic development, indicating that biological conditions improved as Nebraska’s output market and...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984-2009, we follow persons from their working life into their retirement years and find that, on average, employed people maintain their life satisfaction upon retirement, while long-term unemployed people report a substantial increase in...

Existing studies of trust formation in U.S. metropolitan areas have found that trust is lower when there is more income inequality and greater racial fragmentation. I add to this literature by examining the role of income inequality between racial groups (racial income inequality). I find that...

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in economic history. Moreover, a number of core findings in the literature are widely agreed upon. There are still some populations, places, and times, however, for which anthropometric evidence remains thin. One...