Recent research suggests that unobserved components models can, under certain conditions, be estimated without imposing the common zero-correlation restriction between the permanent and transitory innovations. The impact of this restriction, however, has not previously been examined in an...

The majority of multinational firms today operate a multilateral production network. Most existing empirical analyses have, however, focused on firms' choice between producing at home and investing overseas and assumed a firm's decision to invest in a foreign country is independent of its...

Many nations have undergone significant trade liberalization in the last twenty years even as they have increased their use of contingent protection measures. This raises the question of whether some of the trade liberalization efforts, at times accomplished through painful reforms, have been...

Governments provide public information about economic conditions to reduce information imperfections and facilitate efficient allocation of resources. Do households in developing countries rely on public signals to inform themselves about market conditions? To identify the importance of public...

Using household data from Vietnam, we provide evidence on the causal effects of education on freedom of spouse choice. We use war disruptions and spatial indicators of schooling supply as instruments. The point estimates indicate that a year of additional schooling reduces the probability of an...

This paper presents evidence on intergenerational occupational mobility from agriculture to the nonfarm sector using survey data from Nepal with a focus on the role played by cultural inheritance and gender norms. In the absence of credible instruments, the degree of selection on observables is...

This paper argues that there is a fundamental conflict between financial liberalization and private sector led development strategy in developing countries. Using a simple model of occupational choice with moral hazard, it shows that under financial liberalization banks may (i) fail to finance...

Many governments provide monetary transfers to low-income families. The mechanism through which these subsidies are distributed may contain several inefficiencies that diminish the net-value obtained by the recipients. In this paper, we build and estimate a behavioral dynamic model that allows...

Some supporters of antidumping have argued that this procedure serves as a kind of “safety valve” for protectionist pressure. In this paper, we investigate whether there is empirical evidence that the use of antidumping actions has contributed to ongoing tariff reductions over the period...

A number of theoretical studies have predicted that preferential trade agreements (PTAs) raise outside multinationalsí incentive to invest in the participating countries, especially in those that are integrated with larger markets and have lower production costs. The hypothesis has however not...