In <em>Poor Economics</em>, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo eschew grand theorizing about poverty reduction in favor of an approach in which intelligently designed and tested small interventions, based on a scientific understanding of the lives of the poor, marginally improve their welfare. In so...

The recent literature exploiting natural events as "natural experiment" instruments is reviewed to assess to what extent it has advanced empirical knowledge. A weakness of the studies that adopt this approach is that the necessary set of behavioral, market, and technological assumptions made by...

I illustrate the variety of approaches to development issues microeconomists employ, focusing on studies that illuminate and quantify the major mechanisms posited by growth theorists who highlight the role of education in fostering growth. I begin with a basic issue: what are the returns to...

A framework for understanding the determinants in the variation in the pricing of skills across countries and the model underlying the Mincer specification of wages that is used widely to estimate the relationship between schooling and wages are described. A method for identifying skill prices...

There is an emerging consensus among macro-economists that differences in technology across countries accounts for the major differences in per-capita GDP and the wages of workers with similar skills across countries. Accounting for differences in technology levels across countries thus can go a...

In this paper we use a new data set describing households with and without twin children in China to quantify the trade-off between the quality and quantity of children using the incidence of twins that for the first time takes into account effects associated with the lower birthweight and...

We show empirically using panel data at the plot and farm level and based on a model incorporating supervision costs, risk, credit-market imperfections and scale-economies associated with mechanization that small-scale farming is inefficient in India. Larger farms are more profitable per acre,...