Showing 1 - 10 of 437
This paper seeks to better understand the historical origins of current differences in norms and beliefs about the appropriate role of women in society. We test the hypothesis that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013124538
Feeding the world’s growing population is one of the most critical policy challenges for the 21st century. With tightening constraints on water, arable land, and other natural resources, agricultural innovation is quickly becoming the most promising path meet the nutrient needs for future...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013309902
Classic Big Push industrialization envisions state planners coordinating economic activity to internalize a range of externalities that otherwise lock in a low-income equilibrium, but runs afoul of well-known government failure problems. Successful Big Push coordination may occur instead when a...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013128601
This paper tests the differential effects of the generosity of the welfare state under free migration and under policy-controlled migration, distinguishing between source developing and developed countries. We utilize free-movement within the EU to examine the free migration regime and compare...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013129125
We examine the productivity of informal firms (those that are not registered with the government) in 24 African countries using field work and World Bank firm level data. We find that productivity jumps sharply if we compare small formal firms to informal firms, and rises rapidly with the size...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013129131
We estimate productivities at the sector level for 72 countries and 5 decades, and examine how they evolve over time in both developed and developing countries. In both country groups, comparative advantage has become weaker: productivity grew systematically faster in sectors that were initially...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013129215
This paper builds a tractable partial equilibrium model in the spirit of Melitz (2003), which incorporates two dimensions of heterogeneity: firms specific productivity shocks and firm-market specific demand shocks. The structural parameters of interest are estimated using only cross-sectional...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013135758
This paper revisits the long-standing issue of the incidence of taxes in developing countries. Its central theme is that despite many decades of studies, tax incidence analyses for developing countries continue to be based upon the same shifting assumptions used in developed country studies,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013137862
In developing countries, informal firms (those that are not registered with the government) account for about half of all economic activity. We consider three broad views of the role of such firms in economic development. According to the romantic view, these firms would become the engine of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013138466
Poor countries must specialize in standardized. labor-intensive commodities. Middle income countries may have a richer menu of options available to them if their labor force is reasonably well-educated and skilled. This paper is motivated by the possibility that there may exist multiple...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013138621