Recent trade theory emphasizes the role of market-share reallocations across firms ("stealing") in driving productivity growth, while the older literature focused on average productivity improvements ("learning"). The authors use comprehensive, firm-level data from India's organized...

The Czech Republic had experienced a credit boom similar to those in other converging economies in the pre-crisis years. Nevertheless, the consequences of this credit boom were limited as was the impact of the global crisis on domestic financial institutions. This paper describes the...

Why do women engage in transactional sex? While much of the explanation is that sex-for-money pays more than other jobs, this paper uses a unique panel dataset constructed from 192 self-reported diaries of sex workers in Western Kenya to show that women who supply transactional sex develop...

Measurement of the middle class has recently come to the center of policy debate in middle-income countries as they search for the potential engines of growth and good governance. This debate assumes, first, that there is a meaningful definition of class, and second, that thresholds that define...

There is a renewed debate on the role of exchange rate policies as an industrial policy tool in both academic and policy circles. Policy practitioners usually examine real exchange rate misalignments to monitor the behavior of this key relative price and, if possible, exploit distortions in the...

This paper seeks to assess the extent to which a country's overall level of development and that of its financial sector, in particular, are factors that attract private capital into infrastructure projects. The authors investigate these effects in a 1990-2007 dataset on the power sector in 37...

This paper proposes a parametric approach to estimating a dynamic binary response panel data model that allows for endogenous contemporaneous regressors. This approach is of particular value for settings in which one wants to estimate the effects of an endogenous treatment on a binary outcome....

Capital is a fundamental component of agricultural production, and the accumulation of capital is key to growth in agriculture and the process of development. Unfortunately, cross-country data sets on agricultural fixed capital are rare. Using a common methodology that allows comparisons across...

Model uncertainty hampers consensus on the key determinants of economic growth. Some recent cross-country, cross-sectional analyses have employed Bayesian Model Averaging to address the issue of model uncertainty. This paper extends that approach to panel data models with country-specific fixed...

This paper brings new evidence on the impact of services liberalization on the performance of manufacturing firms. Using a unique database of Ukrainian firms in 2001-2007, the authors utilize an external push for liberalization in the services sector as a source of exogenous variation to...