Little is known about the extent and forces of urban path dependence in developing countries.  Railroad construction in colonial Kenya provides a natural experiment to study the emergence and persistence of this spatial equilibrium.  Using new data at a fine spatial level over one century...

Do locational fundamentals such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavorable locations for centuries?  We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, which temporarily ended urbanization in Britain,...

Using detailed survey data from Nepal, this paper examines the determinants of child labor with a special emphasis on urban proximity. We find that children residing in or near urban centers attend school more and work less in total but are more likely to be involved in wage work or in a small...

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 non-orphaned children surveyed in 1991-94, who were traced and reinterviewed as adults in 2004. A large proportion, 19...

This paper evaluates whether immigration can mitigate the Dutch disease effects associated with booms in natural resource sectors.  We derive predicted changes in the size of the non-tradable sector from a small general-equilibrium model a la Obstfeld-Rogoff.  Using data for Canadian...

This paper examines the spatial distribution of jobs across US counties and investigates whether sectoral employment is becoming more or less concentrated. The existing literature has found deconcentration (convergence) of employment across urban areas. Cities only cover a small part of the US,...

This study employs the pseudo-panel approach to estimate returns to education among income earners in Sri Lanka.  Pseudo-panel data are constructed from nine repreated cross-sections of Sri Lanka’s Labor Force Survey data from 1997-2008 for workers born during 1953-1974.  The results...

This paper looks at the impact of education on household economic welfare in Sri Lanka over twenty years from 1985 to 2006 using five cross section household survey datasets.  Applying quantile regression techniques the analysis finds that the incremental value to household welfare shows a...

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...