Expansion in mobile phone coverage has improved access to information throughout the developing world, particularly within sub-Saharan Africa.  The existing evidence suggests that information technology has improved market efficiency and reduced consumer prices for certain commodities.  There...

Height is the result of a complex process of growth that begins at birth and reaches the end in early adulthood.  This paper studies the determinants of height from birth to maturity.  A height production function is specified whose structure allows height to be the result of the accumulation...

This paper studies the distributional impact of commodity price shocks over both the short and very long run.  Using a GARCH model, we find that Australia experienced more volatility than many commodity exporting developing countries over the periods 1865-1940 and 1960-2007.  A single equation...

Poor people often do not make investments, even when returns are high.  One possible explanation is that they have low aspirations and form mental models which ignore some options for investment.  This paper reports on findings of an innovative experiment to test this in rural Ethiopia. ...

The present study employs recent World Bank data to shed light, in a global context, on the transformation of income and inequality changes to poverty reduction for a large number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).  The study begins by shedding light on SSA's progress on poverty.  Next,...

Using global data we examine the dynamics of migration from developing to developed countries.  Origin and destination countries are characterized by substantial diffrences in incomes, political rights and cultures.  Incentives as well as costs shape the decision to migrate.  One powerful...

We introduce a new 'supply-push' instrument for foreign aid, to be used together with an instrumental variable estimator that filters out interactive fixed effects.  We use this instrument to study the effects of aid on macroeconomic ratios, and especially the ratios of consumption, investment,...

Because of transportation costs, African manufacturing firms benefit from some market power on their domestic market, where they can charge a higher price than the export price, net of transportation cost. We present a simple theoretical model of an exporting firm that discriminates between the...

We study the origins of adult mental health using early life income fluctuations.  Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we show that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early life decreases the...