This paper estimates the long-run transmission of the Great Leap Famine (1959-61) to the current trade of Chinese provinces. Based on the provincial dispersion of famine severity, we find that provinces more severely affected by the famine have smaller food exports compared to non-food exports,...

This paper estimates the long-run transmission of the Great Leap Famine (1959-61) to the current trade of Chinese provinces. Based on the provincial dispersion of famine severity, we find that provinces more severely affected by the famine have smaller food exports compared to non-food exports,...

By providing more public goods (irrigation), collective agriculture can deal with negative weather shocks more effectively. Yet, collective institutions are fraught with problems of work incentives, excessive grain procurement, and the like, which in one extreme historical instance had resulted...

This chapter considers methods for evaluating the impact of social programs in the presence of nonrandom program placement or program selection. It first presents the evaluation problem as a missing data problem and then considers various solutions proposed in the statistics and econometrics...

The chapter critically reviews the methods available for the ex post counterfactual analysis of programs that are assigned exclusively to individuals, households or locations. The emphasis is on the problems encountered in applying these methods to anti-poverty programs in developing countries,...

Inverse problems can be described as functional equations where the value of the function is known or easily estimable but the argument is unknown. Many problems in econometrics can be stated in the form of inverse problems where the argument itself is a function. For example, consider a...

Economists have devoted increasing attention to the magnitude and consequences of measurement error in their data. Most discussions of measurement error are based on the “classical” assumption that errors in measuring a particular variable are uncorrelated with the true value of that...

This chapter discusses how applied researchers in corporate finance can address endogeneity concerns. We begin by reviewing the sources of endogeneity—omitted variables, simultaneity, and measurement error—and their implications for inference. We then discuss in detail a number of...