Malaria ranks among the foremost health issues facing tropical countries. In this paper, we explore the determinants of cross-country differences in malaria morbidity, and examine the linkage between malaria and economic growth. Using a classification rule analysis, we confirm the dominant role...

Previous studies for developed countries show negative short-run impacts of automation on employment and earnings. In this paper, we instead examine whether automation by a key trading partner can hurt workers in a developing country. We specifically focus in Colombia's labor market, and how the...

Some cultural goods, like clothes and films, are consumed socially and are thus characterized by the same consumption network externalities as languages. At the same time, producers of new cultural goods in any one country draw on the stock of ideas generated by previous cultural production in...

We assess the extent and cost of misallocation in agriculture in less-developed countries comparing the analysis at the plot and farm levels. Using detailed data from Uganda, we show that the plot-level analysis leads to extremely large estimates of reallocation gains, even after adjusting for...

Tile drainage was first demonstrated in the United States in 1835 as a method to adapt agriculture to excessive water in soils. Subsequently, innovations in coordinated drainage enterprises, engineering, and tile manufacture led to drainage over large portions of the U.S. Midwest and Southeast....

The slow adoption of new agricultural technologies is an important factor in explaining persistent productivity deficits among smallholders in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Farmers delay in particular the uptake of technology packages. Since knowledge constraints are an important barrier to...

How do banks respond to asset booms? This paper examines i) how U.S. banks responded to the World War I farmland boom; ii) the impact of regulation; and iii) how bank closures exacerbated the post-war bust. The boom encouraged new bank formation and balance sheet expansion (especially by new...

We estimate the impact of the tariffs that U.S. export crops face on farmland rental rates. The estimation of the impact of the localized measure on the rents faces two aggregation problems that lead to identification challenges: a) aggregating tariffs across trading partners to obtain...