I use variation in childhood exposure to the Dust Bowl, an environmental shock to health and income, as a natural experiment to explain variation in adult human capital.  I find that the Dust Bowl produced significant adverse impacts in later life, especially when exposure was in utero,...

A vector autoregression is singular when explosive characteristic roots have geometric multiplicity larger than one.  The singular component is a mixingale.  Martingale decompositions are constructed for sample moments involving the singular component.  This permits weak and strong analysis...

This paper discusses the incentive to bundle when consumer valuations are non-additive and/or when products are supplied by separate sellers.  Whether integrated or separate, a firm has an incentive to introduce a bundle discount when demand for the bundle is more elastic than the overall...

How well did Kenyans do under colonial rule?  It is common sense that Kenyans suffered under exploitative colonial policies.  The overall impact, however, is uncertain.  This study presents fresh evidence on nutrition and health in colonial Kenya by (1) using a new and comprehensive data set...

This paper offers an explanation for the properties of the nominal term structure of interest rates and time-varying bond risk premia based on a model with rare consumption disaster risk.  In the model, expected inflation follows a mean reverting process but is also subject to possible large...

There has been extensive discussion of the workings of the English system of higher education income contingent student loans.  Major focuses have been on what former students are likely to pay and when, distributional characteristics and how much the Government guarantees made to students...

This paper investigates two channels through which research and development (R&D) and human capital may affect regional total factor productivity growth in the manufacturing sector, using panel data on 159 EU-15 regions from 1992 to 2005.  Based on the endogenous growth model of Griffith,...

As formalized by Montgomery (1991), referral by employees improves efficiency if the unobserved quality of a new worker is higher than that of unrefereed workers.  Using data compiled by army archives, we test whether the referral system in use in the British colonial army in Ghana served to...

South Africa in the 1990s became globally more integrated after years of isolation.  Opening the trade and capital accounts gave impetus to a monetary policy regime change to inflation targeting from 2000, after a costly transitional period of monetary mismanagement with low policy...

In this paper, we use a three-period panel of Tanzanian households to explore the determinants of earnings and earnings growth from 2004 to 2006.  In doing so, we draw particular attention to the role of education and to the importance of heterogeneity between more and less formal...