This paper presents evidence on how farmers’ decisions to adopt a new crop, sunflower,relate to the adoption choices of farmers in their social network of family and friends. Weshow that the relationship is shaped as an inverse-U, suggesting social effects are positivewhen there are few...

Industrial delicensing which began in 1985 in India marked a discrete break from apast of centrally planned industrial development. Similar liberalization episodes are takingplace across the globe. We develop a simple Schumpeterian growth model to understand how…rms respond to the entry threat...

What is meant by entrepreneurship, innovation and economic growth is often not clear or very idiosyncratic. This paper starts with a discussion of the nature of entrepreneurship and its relation to innovation. The second section provides an overview of theory and empirical research on the...

Compulsory licensing allows firms in developing countries to produce foreign-owned inventions withoutthe consent of foreign patent owners. This paper uses an exogenous event of compulsory licensingafter World War I under the Trading with the Enemy Act to examine the long run effects of...

With the use of comparable data from seven West African capitals, we attempt to assess the rationale behind development policies targeting high rates of school enrolment through the prism of allocation of labour and returns to skills across the formal and informal sectors...

This paper theoretically investigates how community approval or disapprovalaects school attendance and child labor and how aggregate behavior of thecommunity feeds back towards the formation and persistence of an anti- (or pro-)schooling norm. The proposed community-model continues to take...

A century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced socially contingent con-sumption into the economic literature. This paper complements the scarceempirical literature by testing his conjecture on South African householddata and nds that Black and Coloured households spend relatively moreon visible...

This paper analyses the empirical determinants of contract length, a key andyet neglected dimension of contractual structure. I estimate contract length andcontract type jointly using original data on tenancy agreements signed between1870 and 1880 in the district of Siracusa, Italy.The findings...

The choice of cultivation techniques is a key determinant of agricultural productivityand has important consequences for income growth and poverty reductionin developing countries. Using household data from Nicaragua this papershows that the choice of cultivation techniques depends on farmers’...

Few micro…nance-funded businesses grow beyond subsistence entrepreneur-ship. This paper considers one possible explanation: that the structure ofexisting micro…nance contracts may discourage risky but high-expected returninvestments. To explore this possibility, I develop a theory that uni…es...