Microcredit seeks to promote business growth and improve well-being by expanding access to credit. We use a field experiment and follow-up survey to measure impacts of a credit expansion for microentrepreneurs in Manila. The effects are diffuse, heterogeneous, and surprising. Although there is...

I show how abundant land and scarce labor shaped African institutions before colonial rule. I present a model in which exogenous suitability of the land for agriculture and endogenously evolving population determine the existence of land rights, slavery, and polygyny. I then use cross-sectional...

This paper examines the major economic and institutional factors underlying the surge in foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to Chile during the 1985-2002 period. It presents econometric evidence which indicates that market-based economic reforms and major changes in the institutional-legal...

This paper suggests that area studies and economics have a better chance to be married successfully if we shift our attention from the exclusive emphasis on economic growth towards improvements in human development, especially the much broadened version of that concept. Different areas are shown...

This paper addresses the important question of whether public investment spending on economic infrastructure enhances economic growth and labor productivity in Argentina. Following the lead of the endogenous growth literature, it presents a simple modified production function that explicitly...

Unskilled labor is the abundant resource in many developing countries, especially at an early stage of their development. Yet, even as at given technologies labor markets have not cleared, neo-classical economists have rejected the notion of an institutional or bargaining wage not based on...

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...

The historical fertility transition is the process by which much of Europe and North

This paper introduces habit formation into an otherwise standard model of international trade. Household tastes evolve over time to favor foods consumed as a child. The opening of trade causes preferred goods to rise in price, as these were relatively inexpensive in autarky. Neglecting the...

There is an emerging consensus among macro-economists that differences in technology across countries account for the major differences in per-capita GDP and the wages of workers with similar skills across countries. Accounting for differences in technology levels across countries thus can go a...