This paper examines the impact of the spatial accessibility of public human services agencies on the likelihood of receiving a child care subsidy among disadvantaged mothers with young children. In particular, we collect data on the location of virtually every human services agency in the U.S....

In this paper I explore the effect of patronage or machine' politics on government performance in American cities during the Progressive era. I use game theoretic models and an empirical analysis of spending and public goods provision during the first decade of the twentieth century in a cross...

Trade between the whole of Africa and China (imports and exports summed) grew from $10.6 billion to $73.3 billion between 2000 and 2007, and between Sub-Saharan Africa and China from $7 billion to $59 billion over the same period. China is now Africa's third largest trading partner behind the EU...

As China has become an increasingly important part of the global trading system over the past two decades, interest in the country and its international economic policies has increased among international economists who are not China specialists. This paper represents an attempt to provide the...

India's child stunting rate is among the highest in the world, exceeding that of many poorer African countries. In this paper, we analyze data for over 174,000 Indian and Sub-Saharan African children to show that Indian firstborns are taller than African firstborns; the Indian height...

Both human capital and nonhuman capital play an important role in economic growth. Estimates of nonhuman (physical) capital exist for many more countries than for human capital. Recently there has been a significant increase in the number of countries for which estimates of human capital exist,...

A central question in intrastate conflicts is how insurgents are able to mobilize supporters to participate in violent and risky activities. A common explanation is that violence committed by counterinsurgent forces mobilizes certain segments of the population through a range of mechanisms. We...

The literature on conflict and terrorism has paid little attention to the economic costs of terrorism for the perpetrators. This paper aims to fill that gap by examining the economic costs of committing suicide terror attacks. Using data covering the universe of Palestinian suicide terrorists...

Most aid spending by governments seeking to rebuild social and political order is based on an opportunity-cost theory of distracting potential recruits. The logic is that gainfully employed young men are less likely to participate in political violence, implying a positive correlation between...

In this paper, we investigate changes in the impacts of world crude oil prices on domestic prices in Japan. First, we employ a time-varying parameter VAR (TVP-VAR) approach to confirm that the rate of pass-through of oil prices declined, both at the aggregate and sectoral levels, for the period...