Despite its economic success, India has made little progress towards meeting its Millennium Development Goal targets of reducing undernourishment, particularly among children. Using nationally representative data, our analysis finds evidence of an improvement in the anthropometric measures of...

In this paper we examine the demand for education among rural Black households in South Africa using nationally representative data from the 1990s. In particular our study focuses on factors affecting schooling decisions at the household level. Our estimation results reveal strong evidence of a...

To study whether foreign aid fuels personal, regional and ethnic favoritism, we use satellite data on nighttime light for any region in any aid-recipient country, and we determine for each year and each country the region in which the current political leader was born. Having a panel with 22,850...

Appropriate pricing of water is critical for improving the efficiency of pipe-borne water supply systems in many developing countries. However, existing literature on residential, industrial and commercial water demand has primarily focused on developed countries. This paper estimates the demand...

This paper formulates a demand model for residential water in Sri Lanka using the Stone-Geary functional form. This functional form has two main advantages when compared with Cobb-Douglas: non-constant price elasticities and; it considers water consumption as two components – a fixed and a...

This paper examines how availability of microfinance influences households' borrowing from informal sources in village economies. It uses a unique household level panel data set, which spans more than two decades (1987-2008), from rural villages in Bangladesh. We find that households' access to...

Changes in the unemployment rate can have differing impacts on the labour force participation rate depending on the strength of the added worker effect and the discouraged worker effect. This paper documents the differences in the relationship between the unemployment rate and the labour force...

This paper estimates, using a large panel data set from rural Bangladesh, the effects of health shocks on household consumption and how access to microcredit affects households' response to such shocks. Our results suggest that even though in general consumption remains stable in many cases when...