Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop-based economies experienced a substantial deceleration of growth since the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. Rodrik (1999) has demonstrated that the magnitude of a country's growth deceleration since the 1970s is a function of both the...

Using data from community-based water services in Sri Lanka and India, this paper first shows that: (a) improved household health and reduced water collection times are associated with better service design and construction: (b) well-designed services involve more community members in the design...

This paper develops and tests a model of technology adoption which predicts that the probability of adoption is increasing in household-level human capital and land endowments and village-level adoption patterns and social capital. The results of implementing the model with data from the plateau...

Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop-based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. This article illustrates how countries dependent on point source natural resources (those extracted from a narrow geographic...

I assess the stability of the monetary environment in Switzerland over the past two centuries. In order to control for transitory measurement errors, in particular in nineteenth century data, I use an unobserved-components stochastic-volatility model to extract the permanent trends from several...

Measurement error in historical data distorts descriptive analyses based on binary classifications. Modern replications of deficiencies in retrospective CPI estimates for the 19th century show that measurement issues cause misclassification of inflationary and deflationary episodes. We therefore...