This paper investigates the sensitivity of the intergenerational transmission of health to exogenous changes in income, education and public health, changes that are often delivered by economic growth. It uses individual survey data on 2.24 million children born to 600000 mothers during...

This paper investigates cyclicality in women's labour supply motivated by the hypothesis that it contributes to smoothing household consumption in environments characterized by income volatility. We use comparable individual data on about 1.1 million women in 63 developing and transition...

This paper is motivated to investigate the often neglected payoff to investments in the health of girls and women in terms of next generation outcomes. This paper investigates the intergenerational persistence of health across time and region as well as across the distribution of maternal...

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of empirical evidence about the impact of financial globalization on growth and volatility in developing countries. The results suggest that it is difficult to establish a robust causal relationship between financial integration and economic growth....

Do middle-income countries face difficult challenges producing consistent growth? Using transition matrix analysis, we can easily reject any unconditional notion of a “middle-income trap” in the data. However, countries have different fundamentals and policies. Using a nonparametric...

International capital flows, while potentially beneficial, are said to increase a country's vulnerability to crisis - especially if they are skewed to non-FDI types. This paper studies whether the volume and composition of capital flows affect the degree of credit crunch faced by a country's...

This paper proposes a simple model to study the relationship between domestic institutions - financial system, corporate governance, and property rights protection - and patterns of international capital flows. It studies conditions under which financial globalization can be a substitute for...

This paper studies the value of external commitment to policy reforms in the case of WTO/GATT accessions. The accessions often entail reforms that go beyond narrowly defined trade liberalization, and have to overcome fierce resistance in the acceding countries, as reflected in protracted...

While new conventional wisdom warns that developing countries should be aware of the risks of premature capital account liberalization, the costs of not removing exchange controls have received much less attention. This paper investigates the negative effects of exchange controls on trade. To...

Developing countries traditionally exhibit passthrough of exchange rate changes that is greater and more rapid than high-income countries, but have experienced a rapid downward trend in recent years in the degree of short-run passthrough, and in the adjustment speed. As a consequence, slow and...