This paper studies the effect of local off-farm employment and migration on rural households’ technical efficiency of crop production using a five-year panel dataset from more than 2,000 households in five Chinese provinces. While there is not much debate about the positive contribution of...

China’s rural reforms expose farm households to the risk of administrative land reallocation and adjustment. The possibility of land reallocation gives rise to the problem of tenure insecurity which reduces farm households' incentives to invest in the land and to use the labor forces...

Small communities sometimes increase their local sales tax rate in order to maintain or expand public services. The question addressed here is what is the net effect of changing sales tax rates on revenues from sales taxes? Using both semiparametric and nonparametric regression, we find retail...

Pro-poor growth has been identified as one of the most promising pathways to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) or any subsequent set of goals aiming to reduce poverty worldwide. Related research has developed a multitude of instruments to measure pro-poor growth using absolute and...

In the canonical consumer demand problem, an agent makes a decision about quantities to consume, under the assumption that all possible varieties are available and can be accessed at zero cost. Quantities of each budget item are adjusted to achieve maximum utility subject to the budget...

In this paper we conduct a series of eld experiments in rural India in order to measure preferences related to risk, loss, and ambiguity. Disaggregating by data, we nd that on average women are signicantly more risk averse and loss averse than men, though the higher average risk aversion arises...

The flow of remittances can affect poverty rates, development, and investments in the receiving country and households. Using World Bank survey data from three countries, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya, this research addresses the senders’ and recipients’ characteristics may affect remittance...

We compare the effect of anonymous social network ratings (Yelp.com) and peer group recommendations on restaurant demand. We conduct a two stage choice experiment and combine it with online social network reviews from Yelp.com and find that peers have a stronger impact on restaurant demand than...

Demographic transition due to population aging is an emerging issue throughout the developing world, and especially in China, which has undergone demographic transition more rapidly than most industrial economies. This paper quantifies the economic and distributional effects in the context of...