This paper examines the impact of education, governance and North-South trade- and distance-related technology diffusion on TFP in the South, focusing on South America (SA), Mexico, Latin America (LA) and East Asia for the 32-year period preceding the Great Recession (1976–2007) in a new model...

This paper examines the impact of education, trade, governance and distance on technology diffusion and TFP in Latin America – specifically South America and Mexico (SAM) – and East Asia, over the 32 years preceding the Great Recession (1976–2007). Findings are: i) TFP rises with...

We study a Singaporean drug-selling gang's dataset and empirically find that the gang's pushers purchased larger quantities of drugs during periods of enforcement shocks caused by enforcement activities targeting the gang's drug supply chain. This counter-intuitive finding can be explained by...

This paper examines the effects of Asian segregation on students' academic performance in New York City primary schools. We use exogenous variation in the share of Asian students across cohorts and schools stemming from a fertility shock among Asian population in the Chinese year of the Dragon....

Refugees are often perceived as an economic "burden", as the current debate on the European refugee crisis illustrates. But there is little quantitative evidence on the medium-term outcomes of refugees in the UK. We fill this gap by looking at the case of "East African Asians" who arrived as...

This paper analyzes a panel of 18 European countries spanning from 1950 to 2003 to examine the extent to which the legal reforms leading to easier divorce that took place during the second half of the 20th century have contributed to the increase in divorce rates across Europe. We use a...

This study empirically examines the fragility of five major Asian economies (China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, and South Korea) to economic policy uncertainty (EPU) of US and EU, and oil prices in different state of the economies. To investigate these dynamics, we use the relative tail dependence...

Detecting racial discrimination using observational data is challenging because of the presence of unobservables that may be correlated with race. Using data made public in the SFFA v. Harvard case, we estimate discrimination in a setting where this concern is mitigated. Namely, we show that...

A number of recent studies for Latin America show that as the size of the informal economy grows, corruption is less harmful to inequality. We investigate if this relationship is equally compelling for developing countries in Asia where corruption, inequality and shadow economies are...

Rebalancing growth patterns of Asian economies is an important component of the overall rebalancing effort that will be required in the world economy. In this paper, I provide an empirical characterization of the composition of GDP levels and growth rates for the key emerging markets and other...