With fortuitously timed data - collected before, during and after a major macro-financial crisis in Bulgaria - we revisit several hypotheses in the economics and nutritional literature related to the tendency of households to smooth their nutritional status over time. We explore the dietary...

In Central and Eastern European women started the process of transition from socialist to market economies with a status quo that differed markedly from women in both de-veloped western and traditional developing economies. They enjoyed an equal or higher level of education than men, virtually...

We examine agricultural child labor in the context of emigration, transfers, and the abil-ity to hire outside labor. We start by developing a theoretical background based on Basu and Van, (1998), Basu, (1999) and Epstein and Kahana (2008) and show how hiring labor from outside the household and...

Several post-Soviet states have introduced policies to improve the relative economic, political or social position of formerly disadvantaged populations. Using one example of such policies – “Kazakhisation” in Kazakhstan – we investigate their impact on the comparative earnings of two...

Donor aid organizations (DAOs) are multi-layered and multi-dimensional bureaucracies with many departments trying to find solutions to problems for countries, investing staff resources and effort into having an effect. A department may come into conflict with other departments because of...

Our analysis of a rich representative household survey for Malawi, where patrilineal and matrilineal institutions coexist, suggests that (a) in matrilineal societies the likelihood of cash crop cultivation by a household increases with the extent of land owned (or de facto controlled) by males,...

We model the aid allocation process as a rent-seeking contest between two countries and investigate the effects of differing allocation rules on recipients' behavior in a simple framework. We investigate the aid allocation mechanism design that attempts to increase the governance quality of...

Empirical studies in the migration literature have shown that migration enclaves (networks) negatively affect the language proficiency of migrants. These studies, however, ignore the choice of location as a function of language skills. Using data on Mexican migration to the US, we show that...