There has been a revival of interest in the effect of risk on economic growth. We quantify both ex ante and ex post effects of risk using a stochastic version of the Ramsey model. We develop a simulation-based econometric methodology which allows us to estimate the model in the structural form...

We investigate the long-term effect of households' exposure to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the Second Intifada (2000-2005) on children's primary school achievement in the West Bank. Our identification strategy exploits the exogenous geographical variation in locality-level conflict...

We investigate the long-term effects of households' exposure to violent conflict on children's educational attainment in primary school, studying cognitive and non-cognitive skills as possible causal channels. Our identification strategy exploits the locality-level variation in the intensity of...

This paper develops a theoretical framework to explain the limited effect of business development programs (BDPs) on entrepreneurs' profits. We argue that a mismatch between a BDP's narrow focus on business-promoting strategies and the wider context in which microentrepreneurs operate can limit...

We study whether and how parents interfere paternalistically in their children’s intertemporal decision-making. Based on experiments with over 2,000 members of 610 families, we find that parents anticipate their children’s present bias and aim to mitigate it. Using a novel method to measure...

A popular form of action to curb child labor and uphold international labor standards in general is a `product boycott' by consumers. There are labeling agencies that inform us if, for instance, a carpet or a hand-stitched soccer ball is free of child labor. The presence of a consumer boycott...

This paper investigates the impact of environmental factors that indicate climate change on household decisions to migrate abroad in the case of Tajikistan, an environmentally vulnerable and a labor-migrant source country in Central Asia. Both long-term climate variation (measured by weather...

The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of households, resulting in widespread poverty and food insecurity. To mitigate these effects, many governments have introduced additional benefits as part of their existing welfare schemes. However, there is...

This paper is an empirical study on the effects of export instability on corruption, in developed and developing countries. We consider that corrupt transactions may arise from the necessity to protect against the detrimental effects of income fluctuations on welfare. We assume that export...

Economic instability may trigger ex ante and ex post corruption strategies, respectively resulting from the perception and experience of economic fluctuations. Using measures of export instability reflecting its ex ante and ex post effects, dynamic panel estimations are conducted with corruption...