This paper takes a novel approach to trying to disentangle the impact of globalization on wages by focusing on changes in the return to speaking English, the international language of commerce, in South Africa as that country re-integrated with the global economy after 1993. The paper finds that...

This paper is about jobs and international trade. It is about what researchers can learn of the relationship between the two using firm-level data. It is about the particular experience of Chile following a broad trade liberalization and spanning significant macroeconomic contraction and...

This paper tries to make sense of the recent trade dispute between the U.S. and Japan in autos and auto parts. The paper argues that there are structural differences between the way that the auto industries are organized in the U.S. and Japan, and that these differences have contributed to the...

It has long been believed that international competition forces domestic firms to behave more competitively. I term this the imports-as--market-discipline hypothesis. I construct a simple static oligopoly model and estimate the model using panel data from Turkish manufacturing firms. The data...

We introduce a new method for conditioning out serially correlated unobserved shocks to the production technology by building ideas first developed in Olley and Pakes (1996). Olley and Pakes show how to use investment to control for correlation between input levels and the unobserved...

The recent financial crisis in Indonesia has resulted in dramatic price increases. Using very recent data, we investigate whether these price increases have impacted the cost-of-living of poor households in a disproportionately harsh way. We find that the poor have indeed been hit hardest. Just...

Addressing public health externalities often requires community-level collective action. Each person's sanitation behavior can affect the health of neighbors. We report on a cluster randomized controlled trial conducted with 19,000 households in rural Bangladesh where we randomized (1) either...

This paper uses national household survey data to examine changes in real per capita incomes in South Africa between 1993 and 2008; the start and the end of the first fifteen years of post-apartheid South Africa. These data show an increase in average per capita real incomes across the distribution....

We define aggregate productivity growth as the change in aggregate final demand minus the change in the aggregate cost of primary inputs. We show how to aggregate plant-level data to this measure and how to use plant-level data to decompose our measure into technical efficiency and reallocation...

This paper examines changes in individual real incomes in South Africa between 1995 and 2000. We document substantial declines--on the order of 40%--in real incomes for both men and women. The brunt of the income decline appears to have been shouldered by the young and the non-white. We argue...