This paper documents the impact of civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo on infant mortality between 1997 and 2004. It adopts an instrumental variable approach to correct for the non-random timing and location of conflict. Strong and robust evidence, including mother fixed effects...

In a rare effort to internalize congestion costs, London recently instituted charges for traveling by car to the central city during peak hours. Although the theoretical influence on the number and severity of traffic accidents is ambiguous, we show that the policy generated a substantial...

This paper provides a simple model to explain effect of political alignment between different tiers of government on policy choices and election outcomes. We derive precise predictions that, as long as voters attribute most of the credit for providing public goods to the local government: (i)...

Economic growth models under uncertainty and rational agents with CRRA utility have been shown to provide quite fragile explanations of consumers.choice as equlib- rium comsumption paths (expected utility) are drastically dependant on distributional assumptions. We show that assuming a SNP...

While an emerging literature cites weather shocks as migration determinants, scant evidence exists on how such migration impacts the markets of receiving communities in developing countries. We address this knowledge gap by investigating the impact of weather-driven internal migration on labor...

High school dropout is an important policy issue and its determinants are a longstanding interest of economics. However, very little is known on the roles of noncognitive traits in influencing school dropout decisions. We employ voluntary forgone health care as a proxy for the underlying...

This paper considers 100 stocks from 10 sectors over the period 2000 to 2010 to examine the impact of market conditions, sector type and horizon on the forecasting performance of various volatility models. Out-of-sample forecasts are generated with standard daily GARCH and with ARFIMA/HAR models...