This paper aims to provide the first evidence concerning the relationship between time and risk preferences and illegal migration in an African context. Based upon our theoretical model and using a unique data set on potential migrants collected in urban Senegal, we evaluate a measure of time...

Using a rich dataset from West Africa we study the determinants of membership in rural producer organizations (RPO). We …nd that on average it is the more fortunate members of rural society who belong in RPOs. In Senegal, the dominant criteria are land ownership. In Burkina Faso it is economic...

Community Driven Development (CDD) programs are an extremely important component of the World Bank’s portfolio in the developing world, representing close to $7 billion in 2003, yet solid empirical evidence on their impact is relatively scarce, especially for Subsaharan Africa. In this paper,...

The purposes of this paper are twofold. First, we examine, using a unique dataset collected in the Tunisian village of El Oulja, what might be termed "all or nothing" separability (Benjamin, 1992) by testing, while controling for plot characteristics (Udry, 1996), the proposition that farm input...

It is frequent, especially in the African context, to find a negative and statistically significant coefficient associated with human capital when it is introduced into the estimation of a plot-level production function. We provide an explanation for this paradox in the context of a...

This paper examines the relative magnitudes of "sheepskin effects" in the returns to education for the three main ethnic groups in the Metropolitan Region of Salvador (MRS), Bahia state, in Northeastern Brazil, and ascertains whether their pattern is consistent with a simple signalling model. We...

Deforestation is a phenomenon that has largely been concentrated in the developing world. We construct a theoretical model of deforestation that focuses on the factors affecting the incentives to transform forested land into agricultural land. We show that: (i) lower discount rates (associated...

In this paper we consider the link often alleged between ethnic diversity and the growth rate of GDP per capita. We first assume that it is ethnic polarization rather than ethnic fragmentation that is harmful for growth so that the relationship may be non-linear. Second, we hypothesize that the...

We consider the classic Allingham and Sandmo (1972) tax compliance problem in the context of the Choquet-Schmeidler Expected Utility (CSEU) model, using the Non—Extremal Outcome (NEO)- additive capacities proposed by Chateauneuf, Eichberger, and Grant (2004), in which Knightian uncertainty...

This paper focuses on instrument choice while consistently estimating the returns to education in Vietnam. Using data culled from the 2 rounds of the Vietnam Living Standards Survey (VLSS), we explore different sets of exogenous instruments that rely on demand and supply side sources of...