With over a billion people in China, the issue of cultivated land conversion is extremely important both in terms of food security and environmental sustainability. This paper investigates the relationship between cultivated land, environment, and food security in China; and seeks to identity the...

We examine the driving forces behind farmers’ decisions to adapt to climate change, and the impact of adaptation on farmers’ food production. We investigate whether there are differences in the food production functions of farm households that adapted and those that did not adapt. We...

Although many of today's ecological, climatic and socio-economic problems seem unprecedented, similar events have occurred in the past. Western Europe's 'middle ages' (circa 11 to 14th century) may be one such case. By the 12th century, medieval Europe had shifted from the subsistence agrarian...

The political left turn in Latin America, which lagged its transition to liberalized market economies by a decade or more, challenges conventional economic explanations of voting behavior. While the implications of upward mobility for the political preferences of forward-looking voters have been...

Latin America and the Caribbean have become in the last decade or so a formidable laboratory for the design and implementation of innovative social policies. In the face of an unprecedented surge in the number of non-contributory social assistance benefit programs in the region, there is a...

This paper contributes to the burgeoning research on inequality and top incomes around the globe by presenting the first available estimates of top income shares and effective income tax rates in contemporary Chile based on analysis of anonymous income tax return microdata. We pay special...

The average Latin American country produces about 1 fifth of the output per worker of the US. What are the sources of these enormous income gaps? I report development-accounting results for Latin America. On average Latin America’s overall physical and human capital endowment relative to the...