Rapidly decreasing gender gaps in schooling in developing countries can be a result of a gendered division of child farm labor as a coping response to increased natural disasters. This paper makes a case for this conjecture by analyzing original household survey data from rural Fiji. Boys, not...

This chapter reviews farm-level economic models of shifting cultivation and those of deforestation and soil conservation related to shifting cultivation. Although economists have made significant progress in modeling shifting cultivation over the last two decades, extant economic models neither...

Using the Kehoe and Ruhl (2009) methodology, we investigate whether the variety of traded goods, which is the extensive margin of trade, has actually changed in a transition economy, such as Mongolia, as predicted by recent theoretical models. We find large increases in the extensive margin of...

How disaster aid is allocated within poor villages is little understood. This paper examines risk-sharing institutions and social hierarchies as village self-allocation mechanisms. Original survey data from Fiji contain rich information about cyclone damage, traditional kin status, and aid...

Although international remittances are important insurance against natural disasters in developing countries, fraud is a pitfall of international labor migration. This paper addresses an unexplored question about the disaster-fraud nexus: Do natural disasters beget fraud victimization among the...

Using original household panel survey data collected in rural Fiji, this paper demonstrates how informal risk-sharing institutions upon which poor people heavily rely in times of illness are vulnerable to natural disasters. First, household private cash-inkind transfers do not serve as insurance...

To be the lowest bidder in procurement auctions, prime contractors commonly solicit subcontract bids at the bid preparation stage. A remarkable feature of the subcontract competition is that "winning is not everything"; the lowest subcontractor gets a job conditional on his prime contractor's...

The effect of accepting more immigrants on welfare in the presence of a pay-as-you-go social security system is analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. First, it is shown that if initially there exist intergenerational government transfers from the young to the old, the government can lead an...

Although economists have extensively studied private transfers exchanged among households within a network, those exchanged directly with groups to which the household belongs ? such as ritual gifts, communal work, and church donations --- have received very limited attention. Using original...

This paper examines the allocation of natural disaster reconstruction funds among cyclone victims in rural Fiji. During post-emergency periods, when good information about cyclone damage is available, do local elites, a powerful minority, capture housing construction materials? With effective...