We use a panel of over 120,000 Chinese firms of different ownership types over the period 2000-2007 to analyze the linkages between investment in fixed and working capital and financing constraints.  We find that those firms characterized by high working capital display high sensitivities of...

Was the London Stock Exchange (LSE) little more than a Dickensian den of speculation, or did it make a contribution to industrial development in Interwar Britain?  The interwar stock market laboured under problems of weak disclosure, inadequate investor protection and ineffective...

Individual behaviors such as smoking, fashion, and the adoption of new products is influenced by taking account of others' actions in one's decisions.  We study social influence in a heterogeneous population and analyze the long-run behavior of the dynamics.  We distinguish between cases in...

It has long been hypothesised that public works programmes, in addition to the welfare effect on those directly employed, can influence equilibrium wage rates.  In this paper we test the impact of the Indian government’s major public works programme, the National Rural Employment...

What is the impact of modern transportation technology on long-run economic change in poor countries with high trade costs?  Rail construction in colonial Sub-Saharan Africa provides a natural experiment: 90% of African rail-road lines were built before independence, in a context where...

Expansion in mobile phone coverage has improved access to information throughout the developing world, particularly within sub-Saharan Africa.  The existing evidence suggests that information technology has improved market efficiency and reduced consumer prices for certain commodities.  There...

Agriculture is the largest sector in most sub-Saharan economies in terms of employment, and it plays an important role in supplying food and export earnings.  Rural poverty rates remain high, and labor productivity is strikingly low.  This paper asks how these factors shape the role of...

A surprising feature of resource-rich economies is slow growth.  It is often argued that natural-resource production impedes development by creating market or institutional failures.  This paper establishes an alternative explanation -  a slow-growing resource sector.  A declining resource...

We theoretically and empirically examine the relationship between natural resource revenues and financial development.  In the theoretical part, we present a politico-economic model in which contract enforcement is low and decreasing in resource revenues when political institutions are poor,...

Panel data on 54 developing countries between 1960 and 2000 are used to investigate how the impact of opening to trade on economic growth is affected by wealth inequality.  The results suggest (a) that opening to trade tends to accelerate growth but (b) that the addition to growth depends...