We use a model of human capital investment and activity choice to explain facts describing gender differentials in the levels and returns to human capital investments. These include the higher return to and level of schooling, the small effect of healthiness on wages, and the large effect of...

Ireland's relatively late and feeble fertility transition remains poorly-understood. The leading explanations stress the role of Catholicism and a conservative social ethos. This paper reports the first results from a project that uses new samples from the 1911 census of Ireland to study...

The decline of human fertility that occurred in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, and elsewhere in the twentieth century, remains a topic of debate largely because there is no accepted explanation for the event. Disagreement persists in part because researchers have rarely used...

Using micro-data from 1984 and 1993 in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, this paper estimates a dynamic stock adjustment model, relating observed drops in fertility post-Communism to new wages, prices, and risks. Earnings influence total demand for children during Communism through substitution...

The historical fertility transition is the process by which much of Europe and North America went from high to low fertility in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This transformation is central to recent accounts of long-run economic growth. Prior to the transition, women bore as many...

We document the presence of multiple and varied constraints to small and medium firm growth. This presents both a practical problem for business training programs and a challenge to academic economists trying to identify mechanisms though which these programs may affect outcomes. External...

Hunger during pre-harvest lean seasons is widespread in the agrarian areas of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. We randomly assign an $8.50 incentive to households in rural Bangladesh to out-migrate during the lean season. The incentive induces 22% of households to send a seasonal migrant, their...

Informal lending and savings institutions exist around the world, and often include regular door-to-door deposit collection of cash. Some banks have adopted similar services in order to expand access to banking services in areas that lack physical branches. Using a randomized control trial, we...

Using the World Bank survey of 1500 firms in five Chinese cities, we study whether the presence of foreign firms produces technology spillovers on domestic firms operating in the same city and industry. We find positive spillovers for more backward firms. We analyze the channels of such...