Sunday birth rates in Ecuador have sharply declined, and the drop is larger among young cohorts in urban areas. These trends are attributed to an increase in cesarean births, which are generally scheduled during regular hospital hours. Multiple rounds of Health Surveys confirm that mothers with...

The Hukou system restricts rural-urban migration in China. This paper proposes positive impact of the Hukou system on education: rural people have stronger incentives to pursue higher education, treating it as a means to obtain urban identity and escape from under-developed areas. Applying the...

This paper presents a new approach to evaluating multiple economic forecasts. In the past, evaluations have focused on the forecasts of individual variables. However, many macroeconomic variables are forecast at the same time and are used together to describe the state of the economy. It is,...

This study addresses basic questions concerning the scope and structure of organizations working in development and poverty activities. Under what conditions is work on many or few poverty problems by a single organization warranted? Moreover, for a given organizational scope, how many issues...

This paper constitutes the introductory essay for the special issue of Climate Change Economics, edited by Malik and Smith, forthcoming in 2012, examining adaptation to climate change in low-income countries. The paper first characterizes different types of adaptations from an economic...

Heat waves, defined as an interval of abnormally hot and humid weather, have been a prominent killer in recent years. With heat waves worsening with climate change, adaptation is essential; one strategy has been to issue heat wave warnings and undertake awareness campaigns to bring about...

The influential contributions of DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux (1996), Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2009), Machado and Mata (2005), and Donald, Green, and Paarsch (2000) provide researchers with a useful toolbox to estimate counterfactual distributions of scalar random variables. These techniques...

Recent research examining U.S. macroeconomic data suggests that revisions may be much more important than traditionally assumed. This paper extends the analysis to Chinese data, where there has been substantial debate about data quality for some time. The key finding in this paper is that indeed...

Using two surveys from Bangladesh, this paper provides evidence on the effects of microfinance competition on village moneylender interest rates and households⣠dependence on informal credit. The views among practitioners diverge sharply: proponents claim that MFI competition reduces both the...

As the trade negotiations within the FTAA region become more complicated with many more options for both the United States and its Latin American partners, it becomes more difficult to determine the prime motivation for any of the partners. Some have argued that the US negotiating process can be...