This paper investigates the role of structural reforms – privatization, financial reform and trade liberalization – as determinants of FDI inflows based on newly constructed dataset on structural reforms for 19 Latin American and 25 Eastern European countries between 1989 and 2004. Our main...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. I describe how the book is an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how economists work, but also to...

How does the relationship between earnings and schooling change with the introduction of comprehensive economic reform? This paper sheds light on this question using a unique data set and procedure to reduce sample selection bias. Our evidence is from consistently coded, non-retrospective data...

Recent research convincingly shows that crises beget reform. Although the consensus is that economic crises foster macroeconomic stabilization, it is silent on which types of crises cause which types of reform. Is it economic or political crises that are the most important drivers of structural...

Why have economic reforms aimed at reducing the role of the state been successful in some cases but not others? Are reform failures the consequence of leviathan states that hinder private economic activity, or of weak states unable to implement policies effectively and provide a supportive...

This paper examines differences in China's ethnic majority and minority patterns of labor force participation and decomposes these differences into treatment and endowment effects using the technique developed by Borooah and Iyer (2005). Population census data are used to estimate...

A recent literature highlights the uncertainty concerning whether economic growth has any causal protective effect on health and survival. But equal rates of growth often deliver unequal rates of poverty reduction and absolute deprivation is more clearly relevant. Using state-level panel data...

We study the labor market outcomes of males aged 18-60 obtaining an urban hukou as a result of land expropriation across a number of provinces in China. Using 2008 and 2009 RUMiC data pooling urban, rural and migrant samples, we find that those obtaining an urban hukou have better labour market...

We measure the effects of trade liberalization over the period of 1993-2002 on regional poverty levels in 259 Indonesian regions, and investigate the labour market mechanisms behind these effects. The identification strategy relies on combining information on initial regional labour and product...