Die unterschiedlichen Transformationserfolge in den mittel- und osteuropäischen Ländern sowie in der Volksrepublik China, aber auch die längerfristigen wirtschaftlichen Entwicklungsprobleme in den meisten schwarzafrikanischen und islamischen Ländern lassen sich nur unvollkommen erklären,...

We use newly-available Indian panel data to estimate how the returns to planting-stage investments vary by rainfall realizations. We show that the forecasts significantly affect farmer investment decisions and that these responses account for a substantial fraction of the inter-annual...

Recent research reveals a negative impact of divorce on children's welfare as a consequence of the reduction in monetary and time contributions by the non-custodian parent. When the custody arrangement is sole custody, the variables that link the absent parent to the child are visitations and...

Regulating seaports is difficult in general, even more so for the weak regulatory institutions common in developing countries. For this reason some countries have awarded these facilities via Demsetz auctions, to the port operator that bids the lowest cargo-handling fee. A major concern with...

The paper celebrates John Fei's life and contributions to economics by viewing them in the context of recent theoretical and empirical literature on the economics and politics of growth. It summarizes the lessons from the literature and development experience since the end of the second world...

This paper examines the apparent conflict between the classical assumption of a bargaining agricultural sector wage and the neoclassical assumption of a competitive wage in the context of a labor surplus developing economy. It concludes that the relatively inelastic supply of labor hours offered...

This paper provides a rough test of a broad and prominent class of political economy of trade models and finds them wanting. The class features governments with weighted social welfare functions, including the prominent model of Grossman and Helpman. Whether the government is the single domestic...

This paper analyzes the economic foundations of a non-democratic political regime, where the ruling bureaucracy captures rents through collective control over state property and job assignment. The model developed here yields the equilibrium in the 'political labor market,' where the ruling...

A central feature of many models of location choice -- whether of firms or households, within or across cities -- is the role of local interactions or spillovers, whereby the payoffs from choosing a location depend in part on the number or attributes of other individuals or firms that choose the...