This paper provides estimates of the long-term effects on height and health of a large income shock experienced in early childhood. Phylloxera, an insect that attacks the roots of grape vines, destroyed 40% of French vineyards between 1863 and 1890, causing major income losses among wine growing...

What are the determinants of the health and of well-being? Income and wealth are clearly part of the story, but does access to health-care have a large independent effect, as the advocates of more investment in health-care, such as the World Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics...

This paper examines equilibrium and stability in symmetric two- player cheap-talk games. In particular, we characterize the set of neutrally stable outcomes infinite cheap-talk 2 x 2 coordination games. This set is finite and does not depend on risk-dominance relations. As the number of messages...

This paper presents a theory of rent seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members. The two key assumptions are constraints on lump-sum transfers from poorer members and disproportionate control rights...

We examine the influence of three historically important sources of social divisions on the availability of public goods in rural India: colonial power, landowner-peasant relations as determined by the land tenure system and social fragmentation based on the Hindu caste system and the presence...

This paper develops a simple macroeconomic model that shows that combining capital market imperfections together with unequal access to investment opportunities across individuals can generate endogenous and permanent fluctuations in aggregate GDP, investment, and interest rates. Reducing...