Surface soil contamination has been long recognized as an important pathway of human lead exposure, and is now a worldwide health concern. This study estimates the causal effects of exposure to lead in topsoil on cognitive ability among 5-year-old children. We draw on individual level data from...

This paper evaluates an Austrian manpower training program, which is highly innovative in its content and financing – and could therefore serve as a role model for other programs. In the late 1980s privatization and down-sizing of nationalized steel firms have lead to large-scale redundancies....

Like most other developing countries, China experiences huge migration outflows from rural areas. Their most striking characteristic is a high geographical and temporal mobility. Rural migrants keep going back and forth between origin villages and destination areas. In this paper, we show that...

The Coase theorem emphasizes the role transactions costs play in efficient market outcomes. We document inefficient outcomes, in the presence of a transactions cost, in southern California land markets and the corresponding transition to efficient outcomes after the transactions cost is...

We examine the impact of legislated land ceiling size on capital investment and industrialisation in the Indian states. India's land ceiling legislations of 1960s and 1970s imposed a ceiling on maximum land holdings and redistributed above-ceiling lands. These ceiling legislations, effectively...

Land requisition has been an important process by which Chinese local governments promote urbanization and generate revenue. This study investigates the impacts of land requisition on farmers' decisions of labor allocation between agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. We argue that,...

Empirical studies of the economic effects of climate change (CC) largely rely on climate anomalies for causal identification purposes. Slow and permanent changes in climate-driven geographical conditions, i.e. CC as defined by the IPCC (2013), have been studied relatively less, especially in...

Monitoring soil quality provides indispensable inputs for effective policy advice, but very few poorer countries can implement high-quality surveys on soil. We offer an alternative, low-cost imputation-based approach to generating various soil quality indicators. The estimation results validate...

The issue of land inequality has garnered renewed interest in development literature due to its potential impact on the welfare of smallholder farmers. Poverty reduction is a crucial sustainable development goal, and a clearer understanding of the factors contributing to poverty is essential for...

This paper examines the effects of performance pay on earnings using linked employee-employer panel data from Finland. These payroll data contain information on the exact share of earnings obtained and hours worked on a performance pay contract. Using these data, we estimate the effects of...