Rural households in many developing economies have incomes that vary seasonally. We explore the implications of this income seasonality for household consumption. We use household-level data from three Indian villages to document seasonal patterns in income and consumption, and to test whether...

We study numerical simulations of a standard trade model with labor mobility costs added, modeled in such a way as to generate gross flows in excess of net flows. We find that adjustment to a trade shock can take a long time with plausible values of parameter values. In our base case, for the...

We construct a dynamic, stochastic rational expectations model of labor reallocation that is designed so that its key parameters can be estimated for trade policy analysis. A key feature is the presence of time-varying idiosyncratic moving costs faced by workers. As a consequence of these...

A household's observed poverty status is an ex-post measure of a household's well-being (or lack thereof). But for thinking about forward-looking anti-poverty interventions that aim to prevent rather than alleviate poverty, what really matters is the vulnerability of households to poverty, i.e.,...

Will economic growth inevitably degrade the environment, throughout development? This paper presents a simple household-choice framework that emphasizes the tradeoff between pollution-causing consumption and pollution-reducing abatement expenditures. The framework yields a simple explanation for...

This paper provides simple, transparent intuition for the perhaps surprising and certainly widely debated empirical findings of "environmental Kuznets curves", i.e. U-shaped relationships between per-capita income and indicators of environmental quality. We consider one possible component of...

Under the TRIPS agreement, WTO members are required to enforce product patents for pharmaceuticals. The debate about the merits of this requirement has been and continues to be extremely contentious. Many poor developing economies claim that patent protection for pharmaceuticals will result in...

The fuel-use decisions of households in developing economies, because they directly influence the level of indoor air quality that these households enjoy (with its attendant health effects), provide a natural arena for empirically assessing latent preferences towards the environment and how...

We introduce neighborhood effects in the costs of human capital acquisition into a model of statistical discrimination in labor markets. This creates a link between the level of segregation and the likelihood and extent of statistical discrimination. As long as negative stereotypes persist in...