This paper uses a novelty dataset of poor households in peri-urban areas in Vietnam to estimate impacts of small loans on child schooling. The Probit and Negative Binomial model estimates roughly indicate no strong evidence of the effect, especially of informal credit. Formal credit is likely to...

This paper focuses on manufacturing employment growth across the 26 states of Brazil. We employ the Glaeser et al. (1992) approach to identify the role played by knowledge externalities in growth and convergence. To assess robustness of the results, we compare cross-section models, dynamic panel...

In this paper, we study the hitherto unexplored evolution of the size distribution of 185 urban areas in Brazil between 1907 and 2008. We find that the power law parameter of the size distribution of the 100 largest urban areas increases from 0.63 in 1907 to 0.89 in 2008, which confirms an...

There is debate about whether microfinance has positive impacts on education and health for borrowing households in developing countries. To provide evidence for this debate we use a new survey designed to meet the conditions for propensity score matching (PSM) and examine the impact of...

Quantile Treatment Effects are estimated to study the impacts of household credit access on health spending by poor households in one District of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. There are significant positive effects of credit on the health budget shares of households with low healthcare spending. In...

This paper combines classic and spatial shift-share decompositions of 1981 to 2006 employment change across the 27 states of Brazil. The classic shift-share method shows higher employment growth rates for underdeveloped regions that are due to an advantageous industry-mix and also due to...

This study examines linkages between the export participation of firms and employee benefits in terms of wages and employment quality. Based on a uniquely matched firm-worker panel dataset for 2007 and 2009, we find evidence that export participation by firms in Vietnam has a positive impact on...

Using a sample of Colombian banks, we examine retail interest rate adjustment in response to changes in wholesale interest rates. Interest rate pass-through running from wholesale to retail rates is found to be both partial and heterogeneous across banks. This suggests that the effectiveness of...

Adopting a production function based approach, we model the role of health as a regular factor of production on economic growth, and use disaggregate measures of male and female health capital using principal components analysis. Allowing for the dynamics of TFP to be embedded in the production...

This paper offers new insights into Beveridge curve analysis by modelling the vacancy-unemployment rate relationship within a Markov regime-switching environment in which the probability of curve-shifting is determined endogenously by shift factors. Shift factor candidates include structural...