We employ bootstrap techniques in a production frontier framework to provide statistical inference for each component in the decomposition of labor productivity growth, which has essentially been ignored in this literature. We show that only two of the four components have significantly...

In the recent literature on entrepreneurship, a growing body of knowledge recognizes that some entrepreneurs have higher ambitions than others and that these entrepreneurial ambitions are an important antecedent of actual firm success. Consequently, it is not surprising that ambitious...

As in the case of agricultural cooperatives, collective fields in extended agricultural households act as an insurance device, by redistributing income between household members. At the same time they entail inefficiencies arising from the incentives to free ride on co-workers efforts....

In this paper we show that in highly unequal societies, different societal groups may support a rent-seeking dicator serving their interests better than the median voter in a democratic regime. Importantly, it is the stakes of dictator in the economy, in the form of capital ownership, that...

In spatial autoregressive models, the functional form of autocorrelation is assumed to be linear. In this paper, we propose a simple semiparametric procedure, based on Yatchew's (1998) partial linear least squares, that relaxes this restriction. Simple simulations show that this model...

Asymmetric climate policies are expected to distort the level-playing field regarding international trade, singularly to the detriment of small open economies. The paper develops a flexible method that provides essential input regarding the design of offsetting measures at the sectoral level. It...

Daily collectors operate worldwide; they charge a fee in exchange for the collection of their client's deposits. The clients recover their savings after one month. With a negative nominal return of -3.3% per month, the service is quite expensive but nonetheless prevalent among the very poor. The...

We analyze the individualization of farm units in Mali in the sense of a transformation of purely collective farms into mixed units in which private plots coexist with collective fields. While a moral-hazard-in-team problem plagues production on the latter, a dilemma arises insofar as the...

In many African societies, beliefs in `occult forces' play a crucial role in mobilizing powerful social energies. Anthropologists, and more recently economists, have also stressed the importance of magico-religious practices in supporting redistributive norms and the important role played by...