We use data from smallholder coffee farms in Vietnam to measure the technical efficiency of coffee producers, and the degree to which potential restrictions on the shadow prices of chemical inputs might reduce overall efficiency among these farmers. Using input-oriented data envelopment analysis...

Why do so many African governments consistently impose high tax rates and make little investment in productive public goods, when alternative policies could yield greater tax revenues and higher national income? We posit and test an intertemporal political economy model in which the government...

This paper introduces new data on climatic conditions to empirical tests of growth theories. We find that, since 1960, temperate countries have converged towards a common high level of income while tropical nations have converged towards various income levels associated with economic scale and...

We build upon international trade literature to analyze the direction of causality between market participation and productivity. Cross-country household data from Tanzania, Vietnam and Guatemala are used in a 2SLS approach with market participation and productivity as endogenous variables....