At roughly 4% per annum, labor productivity in Tanzania has grown more rapidly over the past 14 years than at any other time in recent history. Employment growth has also been strong keeping up with population growth at roughly 2.2 percent per annum. However, the bulk of the employment growth...

We present an empirical analysis of product differentiation using a new dynamic panel data set on film programming choice in a major U.S. metropolitan motion-pictures exhibition market. Using these data, we compute two measures of film programming choice which allow us to investigate the...

Critics of globalization claim that US manufacturing firms are being driven to shift employment abroad by the prospects of cheaper labor. Others argue that the availability of low-wage labor has allowed US based firms to survive and even prosper. Yet evidence for either hypothesis, beyond...

Firms in developing countries cite credit constraints as one of their primary obstacles to investment. Direct foreign investment, by bringing in scarce capital, may ease domestic firms' credit constraints. Alternatively, if foreign firms borrow heavily from domestic banks, they may exacerbate...

Mozambique liberalized its cashew sector in the early 1990s in response to pressure from the World Bank. Opponents of the reform have argued that the policy did little to benefit poor cashew farmers while bankrupting factories in urban areas. Using a welfare-theoretic framework, we analyze the...

The 1990's dealt a blow to traditional Heckscher-Ohlin analysis of the relationship between trade and income inequality, as it became clear that rising inequality in low-income countries and other features of the data were inconsistent with that model. As a result, economists moved away from...

The authors link industry-level data on trade and offshoring with individual-level worker data from the Current Population Surveys. They find that occupational exposure to globalization is associated with larger wage effects than industry exposure. This effect has been overlooked because it...

At roughly 4% per annum, labor productivity in Tanzania has grown more rapidly over the past 12 years than at any other time in recent history. Employment growth has also been strong keeping up with population growth at roughly 2.5 percent per annum; the bulk of employment growth (90%) has been...

We study the effects of domestic trade liberalization on labor markets in Botswana. South Africa is the dominant member of the Southern Africa Customs Union. As such, when South Africa liberalized trade in the 1990s, this induced large and plausibly exogenous tariff reductions for the other...

We show that much of Africa's recent growth and poverty reduction can be traced to a substantive decline in the share of the labor force engaged in agriculture. This decline has been accompanied by a systematic increase in the productivity of the labor force, as it has moved from low...