I illustrate the variety of approaches to development issues microeconomists employ, focusing on studies that illuminate and quantify the major mechanisms posited by growth theorists who highlight the role of education in fostering growth. I begin with a basic issue: what are the returns to...

A framework for understanding the determinants in the variation in the pricing of skills across countries and the model underlying the Mincer specification of wages that is used widely to estimate the relationship between schooling and wages are described. A method for identifying skill prices...

There is an emerging consensus among macro-economists that differences in technology across countries accounts for the major differences in per-capita GDP and the wages of workers with similar skills across countries. Accounting for differences in technology levels across countries thus can go a...

Within the field of economic development over the past 15 years or so, particularly significant advances have been made in what can be loosely called micro-development, an area defined principally by the units that are examined, not by a particular methodological approach. The units may be...

This paper explores some salient issues concerning immigrant health. Ethnic health disparities are inherently linked to immigration since ethnic identities often are traced to the country of origin of one's immigrant ancestors. Two of the central questions that have dominated the medical and...

This paper provides an overview of the New Immigrant Survey Pilot (NIS- P), a panel survey of a nationally representative sample of new legal immigrants to the United States based on probability samples of administrative records of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The NIS-P...

Despite the growing evidence that farmers in low-income environments are risk-averse, there has been little empirical evidence on the importance of risk in shaping the actual allocation of production resources among farmers differentiated by wealth. The authors use panel data on investments in...

In this paper, we address the issues of whether reductions in fertility increase human capital investments per child and whether twinning can identify the quantity-quality (Q-Q) trade-off. We show that estimates of the effects of twinning at higher parities on the outcomes of older children in...