Is the high degree of gender inequality in developing countries--in education, personal autonomy, and more--explained by underdevelopment itself? Or do the societies that are poor today hold certain cultural views that lead to gender inequality? This article discusses several mechanisms through...

This paper investigates the urbanization of the Indian manufacturing sector by combining enterprise data from formal and informal sectors. We find that plants in the formal sector are moving away from urban and into rural locations, while the informal sector is moving from rural to urban...

This paper develops a two-sector general equilibrium model of an economy with an open access renewable resource. We characterize the autarkic steady state, showing that autarky prices (and 'comparative advantage') are determined by the ratio of intrinsic resource growth to labor. Under free...

We study a growth model with an environmental asset which is a source of utility and an input to consumption and production. The stock of this asset follows its own ecological dynamics, which are affected by economic activity. We study the implications of an approach to ranking sequences of...

This paper suggests two generalizations of the deposit-refund idea. In the first, we apply the idea not just to solid waste materials, but to any waste from production or consumption including wastes that may be solid, gaseous, or liquid. Using a simple general equilibrium model, we derive the...

We develop a simple two-sector dynamic model to examine the effects of international trade in the presence of pollution-created cross- sectoral production externalities. We assume that the production of 'Smokestack' manufactures generates pollution, which lowers the productivity of an...

The US-Mexico free-trade debate included some theoretical assertions that were then used as arguments against trade and investment liberalization. (1) Trade liberalization increases the degree to which production is internationally relocated in response to environmental restrictions...

This article examines revealed rates of time preference for public goods, using environmental quality as the case study. A nationally representative panel-based sample of 2,914 respondents considered a series of 5 conjoint policy choices, yielding 14,570 decisions. Both the conditional fixed...

Global climate change poses a threat to the well-being of humans and other living things through impacts on ecosystem functioning, biodiversity, capital productivity, and human health. This paper briefly surveys recent research on the economics of climate change, including theoretical insights...

Recent studies consider public R&D spending that affects abatement knowledge and endogenous growth, distortionary taxes that affect physical and human capital formation, pollution taxes that affect environmental degradation, and regeneration that restores natural capital. Our model combines all...