Gold is frequently mined in rainforests that can provide either gold or forest benefits, but not both. This conflict in resource use occurs in Ghana, a developing country in the tropics where the capital needed for mining is obtained from foreign direct investment (FDI). We use a dynamic model...

Electronic commerce and flexible manufacturing allow personalization of initially standardized products at low cost. Will customers provide the information necessary for personalization? Assuming that a consumer can control the amount of information revealed, we analyze how his decision...

This paper analyzes measurement errors in crime data to see how they impact econometric estimates, particularly of the key relationship between inequality and crime. Criminal victimization surveys of 140,000 respondents in 37 industrial, transition and developing countries are used. Comparing...

Using panel data spanning 15 years, this paper investigates the persistence and correlates of subjective and consumption poverty in urban Ethiopia. Despite the decline in consumption poverty in recent years, which has been linked to rapid economic growth, subjective poverty has remained largely...

Unlike most studies of subjective well-being in developing countries, we use a fixed effects regression on three rounds of rich panel data to investigate the impact of relative standing on life satisfaction of respondents in urban Ethiopia. We find a consistently large negative impact of...

We use panel data from rural Ethiopia to investigate if participation in a safety net program enhances fertilizer adoption. Using a difference-in-difference estimator and inverse propensity score weighting we find that participation in Ethiopia’s food-for-work program increased fertilizer...

Abstract: Studies of political favouritism in Africa often treat ethnic and regional favouritism as interchangeable concepts. The present paper distinguishes between the two and investigates their relative influence in Sub-Saharan Africa. Focusing on whether individuals perceive their ethnic...

Abstract: In the LSMS data for Nepal most agricultural laborers report daily wages, while econometric analysis on the data indicates that, for many villages, the laborers actually have long-term contracts. We have visited some of the villages to solve this puzzle. We find that in some cases the...

The anti-corruption reform in the Tanzanian tax bureaucracy in the mid-1990s was apparently a short-lived success. In the wake of the reform, a number of “tax experts” established themselves in the market, many of them being laid off tax bureaucrats. We argue that middle-men can undermine...

The aim of the present paper is to investigate whether households relocated to governmentbuilt village settlements, as part of Rwanda’s Villagisation programme (‘Imidugudu’), diversify into non-farm income-generating activities to a greater extent than other rural households in Rwanda, and...