This paper reports an experiment in over 3,000 Indonesian villages designed to test the role of performance incentives in improving the efficacy of aid programs. Villages in a randomly-chosen one-third of subdistricts received a block grant to improve 12 maternal and child health and education...

"We identify a new set of stylized facts on the 2008-2009 trade collapse that we hope can be used to shed light on the importance of demand and supply-side factors in explaining the fall in trade. In particular, we decompose the fall in international trade into product entry and exit, price...

This paper examines the welfare consequences of social safety nets in developing economies relative to developed economies. Using panel surveys of households in Indonesia and the United States, we find that food consumption falls by approximately ten percent when individuals become unemployed in...

In order to shed light on the biological and social drivers underlying the dramatic rise in cardiovascular disease risk in lower-income settings, links between these risks and body composition, behavioral and socioeconomic factors in Aceh, Indonesia, are contrasted with the United States. We...

We estimate spillovers from public funding for health research in the context of the NIH's Fogarty International Center's AIDS International Training and Research Program, which aims to strengthen scientific capacity in AIDS endemic countries by providing African researchers with training...

Many developing countries would like to increase the share of modern or formal sectors in their employment. One way to accomplish this goal may be to encourage the entrance of foreign firms. They are typically relatively large, with high productivity and good access to foreign markets, and might...

Analyzing the distributional impacts of economic crises is important and, unfortunately, an ever more pressing need. If policymakers are to intervene to help those most adversely impacted, then policymakers need to identify those who have been most harmed and the magnitude of that harm....

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic adjustment from the crisis in East Asia in a broad international prospective. The stylized pattern from the previous 160 currency crisis episodes over the period from 1970 to 1995 shows a V-type adjustment of real GDP growth in the years prior to and...

This paper asks two types of questions. One is about the behavior of foreign-owned firms in Indonesian labor markets and the other is about the effect of the presence of foreign-owned firms on Indonesian wages. We ask first whether foreign-owned plants pay a higher price for labor, that is, more...

Between 1973 and 1978, the Indonesian Government constructed over 61,000 primary schools throughout the country. This is one of the largest school construction programs on record. I evaluate the effect of this program on education and wages by combining differences across regions in the number...