The Nutrient Data Laboratory of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is collaborating with the Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS), the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), and other government agencies to design and populate a dietary supplement ingredient database...

In this paper we contribute to an understanding of how small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) can be encouraged to participate in the management of environmental common pool resources. We do this by applying ideas from general theories about collective actions and, using evidence from...

This dissertation is an empirical investigation on the microeconomics of growth, focusing on the role of shocks and on the formation of credit networks. It uses original data, collected in Southern Ethiopia, an environment where nonlinear wealth dynamics that are at the root of persistent...

The thesis addresses the question of how poverty can be overcome by education. The starting point is the following type of poverty trap: poverty forces parents to send their children to work to secure the survival of the household. Due to child labor, children do not attend school and do not...

The literature on economic growth and development has focused considerable attention on questions of risk management and the possibility of multiple equilibria associated with poverty traps. We use herd history data collected among pastoralists in southern Ethiopia to study stochastic wealth...

Transaction costs, one often hears, are the economic equivalent of friction in physical systems. Like physicists, economists can sometimes neglect friction in formulating theories; but like engineers, they can never neglect friction in studying how the system actually does let alone should work....

The dissertation explores how distinctive institutional factors related to property rights determine urban development patterns and housing tenure modalities in a developing economy context. The first part proposes a choice-theoretic model that explains the existence of the Antichresis...

This paper presents an econometric approach to the evaluation of environmental regulation using tradable property rights. Existing empirical research on this issue, which compares overall industry efficiency before and after the introduction of new regulations, conflates two distinct phenomena:...