This paper examines the impacts of disasters on dynamic human capital production using panel data from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Malawi. The empirical results show that the accumulation of biological human capital prior to disasters helps children maintain investments in the post-disaster...

This paper develops a link between four central components of the demographic transition: survival rates; fertility decisions; altruistic intergenerational transfers from workers toward their parents; and economic growth. An increase in child survival is found to reduce the fertility rate and...

Labor markets are increasingly global. Overseas work can enrich households but also split them geographically, with ambiguous net effects on decisions about work, investment, and education. These net effects, and their mechanisms, are poorly understood. This study investigates a policy...

This article evaluates the effect of the overdraft facility (or line of credit) policy by comparing a large sample of overdraft facilitated firms and matched non-overdraft facilitated firms from Eastern Europe at the sector level. The sample firms are compared with respect to rates of different...

Cambodia's growth over 1998-2008 has been remarkable (almost 10 percent per annum for a decade). This paper applies a"growth diagnostic"approach to understand how this happened and how it can be sustained. Past growth has been driven by the coincidence of a set of historical and geographic...

The informal sector is typically characterized as being very heterogeneous and possibly composed of two clearly distinct segments, sometimes called the lower and upper tier. However, empirical evidence shows that even among lower tier entrepreneur's profitability can be quite high. The authors...

Combining multi-year, firm-level surveys with country-level panel data for 53 countries, the authors explore the impact of bank competition on firms'access to finance. They find that low competition, as measured by high values of the Lerner index, diminishes firms'access to finance, while...

Industrial parks are as popular as they are controversial, in India and globally. At their best they align infrastructure provision and agglomeration economies to jolt industrial growth. More often, they generate negative spill-overs, provide handouts, sit empty, or simply do not get built. This...

This paper analyzes annual accounting data for a sample of 5,000 publicly traded manufacturing firms from Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The analysis uses data from 1997 to 2011 and finds an increasing trend of excess savings (defined as the difference between gross...

This paper provides the results of an international survey of practitioners with experience in facilitating the participation of African smallholder farmers in supply chains for higher-value and/or differentiated agricultural products. It explores their perceptions about the constraints...