What is the role of transport improvements in globalization? We argue that the nineteenth century is the ideal testing ground: maritime freight rates fell on average by 50% while global trade increased 400% from 1870 to 1913. We estimate the first indices of bilateral freight rates and directly...

What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past and present? We derive a micro-founded measure of trade frictions from leading trade theories and use it to gauge the importance of bilateral trade costs in determining international trade flows. We construct a new balanced sample of...

Using data collected by the International Institute of Agriculture, we document the disintegration of international commodity markets between 1913 and 1938. There was dramatic disintegration during World War I, gradual reintegration during the 1920s, and then a very substantial disintegration...

Pashardes (1991) and Banks et al. (1994) use parametric methods to estimate lifetime equivalence scales. Their approaches put parametric restrictions on the differences in within-period expenditure needs across household types, the intertemporal allocation of expenditure, and the shapes of...

Investigating the earnings and income disparity faced by Aboriginal people in Canada from 1995 to 2005, we find that Aboriginal people face substantial income and earnings gaps in comparison with Canadian-born majority-group workers with similar characteristics (such as age and education). The...

The share of household resources devoted to children is hard to identify because consumption is measured at the household level and goods can be shared. Using semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences within a collective model, we identify how total household resources are divided up...

We consider two econometric problems in the measurement of poverty, both relating to rent imputation. First, we account for quality differences correlated with selection into owneroccupied versus rental tenure. This correction increases estimated household consumption by 5% over uncorrected...

We assess the evolution of consumption inequality in Canada over the years 1997 to 2009. We correct the imputation of shelter consumption for owner-occupiers to allow for unobserved differences in housing quality correlated with selection into rental tenure, and we account for measurement error...