Climate change, especially the warming trend experienced by several countries, could affect agricultural productivity. As a consequence, rural incomes will change, and with them the incentives for people to remain in rural areas. Using data from 116 countries between 1960 and 2000, we analyze...

This paper explores entrepreneurship amongst return migrants, how their business locations and characteristics differ from other businesses, and the implications for rural-urban inequality. First, we examine, amongst returnees, the determinants of investment in a project/enterprise. Second, we...

Using a new set of indicators that measure the Property Insecurity of ethnopolitical minority groups, I find that Property Insecurity is not correlated with the Risk of Expropriation facing foreign investors and domestic elites – revealing that the aggregate measures of 'institutional quality'...

Protecting the entitlements of some inherently requires preventing others from claiming and controlling those same resources. Yet much recent research regarding property rights and economic development treats the level of property rights security in a country as homogeneous. This one-dimensional...

The shale gas revolution in the United States induced an unprecedented commodity boom across northwestern India. Leveraging population-based discontinuities in the contemporaneous roll-out of India's national rural electrification scheme, we show that access to electricity increased total...

The past half-century has witnessed a dramatic change in the way in which people live. Fifty years ago, only a small proportion of the less developed world lived in cities, and world poverty was overwhelmingly rural. In 1950, less than one-fifth of the population of the “third world” was...

n this paper we determine the main driving forces underlying the structural transformation and urbanization process in rapidly industrializing countries. We use a dynamic, small open economy model with an abundant supply of surplus labor in rural areas, two types of traded goods manufactured in...