Economic explanations for the fertility transition focus on the role of returns to schooling, especially for women, which have encouraged women to obtain more education and facilitated the rise in women's wages relative to men's. The private opportunity costs of children have therefore...

The study of labor market segmentation and the estimation of the deadweight loss due to policy distortions reflected in wage structures require analyses of labor force surveys. These data are increasingly available in most countries. But evaluations of labor market reforms are uncommon. The lack...

To identify the determinants of cross-country disparities in personal computer and Internet penetration, we examine a panel of 161 countries over the 1999-2001 period. Our candidate variables include economic variables (income per capita, years of schooling, illiteracy, trade openness),...

Of the diverse factors motivating technological change, one factor that has received increasing attention in the recent past has been the protection of intellectual property rights. Given fairly recent changes in the international policy ethos where a regime of stronger intellectual property...

This paper reviews the methods and empirical findings from economic analyses of women's contribution to social welfare and the determinants of their human capital. To understand better women's roles in agricultural households, three themes have gained prominence in the economics literature....

A consensus has been forged in the last decade that recent periods of sustained growth in total factor productivity and reduced poverty are closely associated with improvements in a population's child nutrition, adult health, and schooling, particularly in low-income countries. Estimates of the...

This paper investigates the impact of the history of crises on macroeconomic performance. We first study the impact of past banking crises on the probability of a future banking crisis. Applying data for 1980 - 2010 for all countries for which the required information is available, controlling...

Food price developments have various impacts at the country and household level, in particular in developing countries with severe implications on food security, poverty and economic stability. The focus of this paper is on wheat as it is, together with rice, the most important food crop. The...

Development policy affects human rights in manifold ways. For example, trade agreements can have an adverse impact on the rights to health or food by making essential medicines or goods less accessible or available. Or large-scale investment projects influence indigenous rights when they entail...

The financialisation of commodity derivative markets, reflected in the increased presence of financial investors, and its effects on commodity prices and the fundamental roles of these markets, i.e. price discovery and price risk management for commercial traders, have been controversially...