This paper examines the long-term impacts of growth and development monitoring in early childhood. For this purpose, we evaluate a pediatric healthcare program, the Systematic Management of Children (SMC), which offers growth and development monitoring through routine health checkups for all...

We document systematic and significant time variation in US lifecycle non-durable consumption profiles. Consumption profiles have consistently become flatter: differences in consumption across generations have decreased. Pooling data across different periods to identify lifecycle profiles masks...

Does the emigration of skilled individuals necessarily result in losses for source countries due to the brain drain? Combining industry-level patenting and migration data from 32 European countries, we show that emigration in fact positively contributes to innovation in source countries. We use...

This paper proposes an answer to the question of why social unrest sometimes occurs in the wake of an IMF Structural Adjustment Program (SAP). Under certain circumstances, partly determined by a country’s comparative advantage, a nation’s elite may have an incentive to make transfers to the...

We claim that a sequential mechanism linking history to development exists: first, history defines the quality of social capital; then, social capital determines the level of corruption; finally, corruption affects economic performance. We test this hypothesis on a dataset of Italian provinces,...

We exploit historical and contemporaneous variation in local credit markets across Russia to identify the impact of credit constraints on firm-level innovation. We find that access to bank credit helps firms to adopt existing products and production processes that are new to them. They introduce...

Experimental evidence on a range of interventions in developing countries is accumulating rapidly. Is it possible to extrapolate from an experimental evidence base to other locations of policy interest (from “reference” to “target” sites)? And which factors determine the accuracy of such...

This paper estimates the returns to household income due to improved access to electricity in rural India. We examine the effect of connecting a household to the grid and the quality of electricity, defined as hours of daily supply. The analysis is based on two rounds of a representative panel...