Developing countries with highly unequal income distributions, such as Brazil or South Africa, face an uphill battle in reducing inequality. Educated workers in these countries have a much lower birth rate than uneducated workers. Assuming children of educated workers are more likely to become...

Youth account for approximately 60 percent of the unemployed population in Sub-Saharan Africa. Seventy two percent of adolescents in the region live below the $2/day poverty line. Vocational education has been identified as a promising avenue for young adults to acquire and develop marketable...

The authors evaluate the impact of an educational intervention, in which a Kenyan non-governmental organization distributes school uniforms to children in poor communities. The Nongovernmental organization (NGO) used a lottery to determine who would receive uniforms. Although compliance with the...

The WHO has recently debated whether to reaffirm its long-standing recommendation of mass drug administration (MDA) in areas with more than 20 percent prevalence of soil-transmitted helminths (hookworm, whipworm, and roundworm). There is consensus that the relevant deworming drugs are safe and...

This paper considers the long-run evolution of the world economy in a model where countries' opportunities to develop depend on their trade with advanced economies. As developing countries become advanced, they further improve trade opportunities for the remaining developing countries. Whether...

We construct a simple career concerns model where high-powered incentives can distort the composition of effort by inducing excessive signaling. We show that in the presence of this type of career concerns, markets typically fail to limit competitive pressures and cannot commit to the desirable...

140 countries have adopted bans on exports of antiquities, in part because these are seen as needed to protect cultural heritage for future generations. However, if enforcement is imperfect, export bans may be counterproductive, spurring the growth of a black market trade which can damage...

This book is based on a conference entitled "Regional Public Goods and Regional Development Assistance", held in Washington, D.C. on November 6-7, 2002. It examines how the IDB and the ADB support the provision of regional public goods (RPGs) in Latin America and Asia, respectively. RPGs are...

We argue that in pharmaceutical markets, variation in the arrival time of consumer heterogeneity creates differences between a producer's ability to extract consumer surplus with preventives and treatments, potentially distorting R&D decisions. If consumers vary only in disease risk, revenue...