This paper investigates how child labor and schooling are responsive to opportunities to work, in particular to opportunities provided by children’s own parents. The paper demonstrates that after controlling for household, parental, regional, and child characteristics, children whose...

Mutual insurance has been shown, theoretically and empirically, to be incomplete and limited by asymmetric information and lack of enforcement mechanisms. While some research has shown that networks based on kinship, neighborhood and ethnicity may provide a locus of insurance and thus a way of...

This paper examines historically the World Bank's twin features: lending to developing economies to achieve tangible results and advocating specific development policies. Section 1 provides some conceptual underpinnings for the view that an effective state is essential for development. It asks...

Uninsured natural disasters can have devastating effects on human welfare and economic growth, particularly in developing countries where large segments of the population are in poverty and government resources and capacity to assist in relief, recovery, and reconstruction are limited. Therefore...