Vietnam grew from an insignificant to the world’s second largest coffee producer during the 1990s. To understand this growth, this paper examines Vietnamese coffee growers’ investment decisions using real options theory. The study finds that producers, with variable costs of 19 cents/lb and...

This paper establishes and explores the implications of a somewhat surprising empirical finding. Although civil war adversely affects the performance of social indicators in general, poorer countries lose less, in absolute and relative terms, than richer countries. It is argued that the...

In the empirical literature on minimum wage enforcement, the standard approach is to measure the number of violations, not their depth. In this paper we present a family of violation indices which, by analogy with poverty indices, can emphasize the depth of violation to different degrees. The...

The basic neoclassical model of migration suggests that migration is induced by real income differentials across locations and will, ceteris paribus, serve to reduce those differentials. And yet there is evidence on growing spatial inequality despite increased migration from poorer to richer...

Since many countries already pursue a range of environmental objectives for agriculture, in particular the supply of positive externalities or public goods (e.g., wildlife habitat, water supply management, provision of landscape amenities) as well as the reduction of negative externalities, such...

Appropriate assessment of the social value of market access is at the core of a broad range of inquiries in trade research. A selection include: the appraisal of industry-level production and consumption distortions due to selective trade liberalization and partial tax reform; the construction...