This paper suggests that people can learn to behave in a way which makes them persistently unlucky or lucky. Learning from one's own experience, as it reinforces a few lucky or unlucky outcomes in early periods, will lead them to repeatedly make choices that lead to lucky or unlucky outcomes. In...

Structural changes in an economy or in financial markets can arise as a result of agents adopting rules that appear to be the norm around them. Such rules are adopted by implicit consensus as they turn out to be profitable for individuals. However, as rules develop and spread they may have...

This paper empirically examines whether and how experiencing climate-related disasters can improve the rural poorfs adaptation to climate change through community-based resource management. Original household survey data in Fiji capture the unique sequence of a tropical cyclone and the...

The effect of accepting more immigrants on welfare in the presence of a pay-as-you-go social security system is analyzed theoretically and quantitatively in this study. First, it is shown that if intergenerational government transfers initially exist from the young to the old, the government can...

Utilizing changes of Japanese immigration law in 1990s, I study the effect of the inflow of unskilled immigrants on native's human capital accumulation by applying the difference of differences estimation method. Using 10 percent sample of the Japanese census data, I show that for individual...

Does land lease tenure insecurity cause decreased productivity and investment in the sugar industry? To answer this question, the present study examined the impact of weak formal tenure lease arrangements on tenantsEinvestment and the productivity of sugarcane in Ba province, Fiji. After...

This paper develops a simple model that provides a unified explanation of the increased skewness of wage income distribution based on differences in flexibility of skills--modeled as differences in the setup costs required to combine/perform a given number of tasks. Our numerical experiments in...

Rapidly decreasing gender gaps in schooling in developing countries can be a result of a gendered division of child farm labor as a coping response to increased natural disasters. This paper makes a case for this conjecture by analyzing original household survey data from rural Fiji. Boys, not...