Using microdata from the National Election Study of the 2004 parliamentary elections in India, we empirically examine the impact of political reservation for disadvantaged castes and tribes on voting behavior. We find that in a reserved constituency, where only members of the disadvantaged...

This study re-examines the buffer stock hypothesis regarding livestock by taking into account differences in wealth level, asset types, and periods after a shock. This paper takes advantage of a unique panel data set of agricultural households in Southern Province, Zambia. The data were...

We examine two sources of productivity improvement in the specialized industrial clusters. Agglomeration improves the productivity of each plant through positive externalities, shifting plant-level productivity distribution to the right. Selection expels less productive plants through...

This paper presents estimates for agricultural production data in areas currently in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh from 1901/02 to 2001/02. A salient feature of these estimates is that they correspond to current international borders. The British Empire of India, which was broken up in 1947...

Village-level aggregate shocks such as droughts and floods cannot be perfectly insured by risk sharing within a village. Then, what type of households are more vulnerable in terms of a decline in consumption when a village is hit by such natural disasters? This question is investigated in this...

This paper presents a new dataset of education stock for Japan, Korea and the US. This dataset has three major advantages over exiting ones such as Barro and Lee (2000), Kim and Lau (1995) and Nehru, Swanson and Dubey (1995). First, this paper's dataset covers nearly one hundred years while all...

We examine two sources of productivity improvement in the specialized industrial clusters of the early twentieth century Japanese silk-reeling industry. Agglomeration improves the productivity of each plant through positive externalities, shifting plant-level productivity distribution to the...

In this paper, we explore the role of the legal system in economic development, focusing on its relationship to the role of private mechanisms in contract enforcement. We use long-term prefecture-level panel data that cover the early stages of industrialization and urbanization in Japan. We...

In this paper, the concept of vulnerability of the poor welfare and its practical measures are scrutinized in order to derive implications for targeting poverty reduction policies toward vulnerable households. As illustration, various measures of vulnerability proposed in the literature are...