Jensen and Miller (2001) have recently demonstrated rice and noodles to be Giffen Goods among the poor in South and North China respectively. We examine whether tortillas, the main staple in Mexico, are also a Giffen Good. The large income change due to the 1995 Peso Crisis and the large...

Market research data are utilized to examine the use of changes in shopping behavior as a method of mitigating the effects of the 2002 Argentine economic crisis. Although the total quantity and real value of goods purchased fell during the crisis, consumers are found to be spending more days...

Innovation is key to technology adoption and creation, and to explaining the vast differences in productivity across and within countries. Despite the central role of the entrepreneur in the innovation process, data limitations have restricted standard analysis of the determinants of innovation...

July 2002 <p> This paper presents a new approach to the old problem of linear dependency of age, cohort and time effects. It is shown that second differences of the effects can be estimated without any normalization restrictions, providing information on the shape of the age, cohort and time effect...</p>

A strong theoretical argument for focusing on access to finance is that financial market imperfections can result in large inefficiencies, as firms with productive investment opportunities underinvest. Lack of access to finance is a frequent complaint of microenterprises, which account for a...

This paper estimates the impact of registering for taxes on firm profits in Bolivia, the country with the highest levels of informality in Latin America. A new survey of micro and small firms enables us to control for a rich set of measures of owner ability and business motivations that can...

Two of the most salient trends surrounding the issue of migration and development over the past two decades are the large rise in remittances, and an increased flow of skilled migration. However, recent literature based on cross-country regressions has claimed that more educated migrants remit...

Using data from surveys of enterprises in Sri Lanka after the December 2004 tsunami, the authors undertake the first microeconomic study of the recovery of the private firmsin a developing country following a major natural disaster. Disaster recovery in low-income countries is characterized by...