Parental attitudes regarding the value of education may determine whether some, none or all school-aged children in a household are enrolled and how much formal education they will eventually complete. To the extent that attitudes are important and can be adequately measured, they should explain...

Height is the result of a complex process of growth that begins at birth and reaches the end in early adulthood. This paper studies the determinants of height from birth to maturity. A height production function is specified whose structure allows height to be the result of the accumulation of...

We conduct a field experiment to investigate employers’ trust in workers. A sample of real entrepreneurs and workers from urban Ghana are respectively assigned to the roles of employers and employees. Employers have the option to hire (trust) an employee, who can in turn choose whether to...

Using global data we examine the dynamics of migration from developing to developed countries. Origin and destination countries are characterized by substantial differences in incomes, political rights and cultures. Incentives as well as costs shape the decision to migrate. One powerful dynamic...

The empirical literature on the economics of happiness has grown rapidly, and much has been learned about the determinants of subjective well-being. Less attention has been paid to its normative implications. Taking China as a case study, this paper first summarises empirical results on the...

Surprisingly little is known about the impact resource booms on income inequality in resource rich countries (Ross, 2007). This paper develops a simple theory, in the context of a two sector growth model in which learning-by-doing drives growth, to explain the time path of inequality following a...

This paper identifies the effect of neighborhood peer groups on childhood skill acquisition using observational data. We incorporate spatial peer interaction, defined as a child’s nearest geographical neighbors, into a production function of child cognitive development in Andhra Pradesh,...

This paper tests the external validity of a simple Dictator Game as a laboratory analogue for a naturally occurring policy-relevant decision-making context. In Uganda, where teacher absenteeism is a problem, primary school teachers’ allocations to parents in a Dictator Game are positively but...

This paper presents unique evidence that orphanhood matters in the long-run for health and education outcomes, in a region of Northwestern Tanzania. We study a sample of 718 nonorphaned children surveyed in 1991-94, who were traced and reinterviewed as adults in 2004. A large proportion, 19...

This article investigates how financial development is beneficial to the reduction of poverty, on the one hand by promoting growth and in the other hand directly by the McKinnon conduit effect. At the same time, however, financial instability which accompanies financial development is...