Girls completing primary schooling in Cote d'Ivoire are less likely to go to secondary schools because of inferior performance in the examination used to ration access. The gender gap in educational achievement varies with household economic status, with poverty inhibiting girls' performance...

Absolute poverty lines are often derived from the cost of obtaining sufficient calories. Where staples vary across regions, such poverty lines may differ depending on whether they are set using national or regional food baskets. Regional poverty lines are open to the objection that they may be...

Health care and status are jointly modeled using household data from Kenya. Both maternal primary education and distance to health facilities affect take-up of child health care, but the former is more powerful. Corrections for the selectivity of illness when modeling health demand are...

We show that geographical factors influence long-run per capita income directly, as well as indirectly, through the quality of institutions. The direct influence of geography on per capita incomes is robust to the inclusion of a sub-Saharan Africa dummy and other tests. We obtain our results by...