sequential labor decisions under uncertainty an estimable household model of west african farmers this paper reports estimates of the structural parameters of a stochastic control model that describcs the labor decisions of small farmers in burkina faso west africa the focus of the estimation is on measuring flexibility in production and intertemporal substitutability in consumption full information maximum likelihood estimates of the primitive parameters of the model are computed even though optimal labor decision rules cannot be derived analytically vuong s non nested model specification test shows that this method yields parameter estimates that are superior to those derived by assuming that farmers solve a deterministic control problem the low levels of agricultural labor effort commonly observed in the survey area are shown to be a consequence both of the low productivity of labor in archaic rainfed agriculture and of farmers awareness that in the absence of a labor market overly ambitious production plans lead to seasonal manpower constraints to meet rainfed farmers concerns agricultural research institutes and extension services should factor flexibility into their research agendas

estimates of consumer loss due to monopoly in the u s food manufacturing industries comment due to monopoly in the u s food manufacturing industries in 1975 was at least 10 billion but possibly as high as 15 billion p 637 the authors suggest that their findings provide justification for expanding the budgets of u s antitrust agencies and for restructuring the industry parker and connor pc have provided only part of the information required to draw these conclusions therefore the results of their study do not provide justification for either expanding the antitrust agencies or restructuring the u s foodprocessing industry indeed it is quite possible that restructuring the industry toward a more atomistic structure would be contrary to the public interest the relevant question is not how much monopoly profit exists in the food processing industry rather the relevant questions are a does an alternative industry structure exist that will provide more net consumer welfare with no increase in resource use and b how can the change to the preferred structure be accomplished and what will be the cost parker and connor have not answered these questions the monopoly overcharge rectangle as defined by pc is illustrated in figure 1 assuming a linear demand curve dd and constant average cost curves ca represents the cost curve if the industry has an atomistic structure parker and connor postulate that the costs of firms in the oligopolistically structured industry c1 are above the costs that would exist in an atomistically structured industry the monopoly price p thus extracts monopoly overcharges of piafca from customers just how much of the overcharge rectangle piafca is an income gain to the monopolistic depends on how much higher the monopolist s average costs c are compared to the competitive level ca parker and connor p 628 what evidence do we have that the monopolists costs are higher than the costs of more atomistically sized firms changes in the number and size of firms in the industry over the past twenty five years strongly indicate that the costs of these larger firms are lower than the costs of the firms they replaced how could higher cost firms have replaced lowercost firms the current structure could have

economic dynamics in the malthusian era evidence from the 1609 spanish expulsion of the moriscos we investigate economic dynamics in the malthusian era using the 1609 expulsion of moriscos from spain sharp population declines in former morisco districts were accompanied by decreased output and increased per capita output while these short run results are consistent with standard malthusian predictions malthusian convergence was delayed up to 1786 in former morisco districts archival sources and historical accounts suggest extractive institutions and cultural differences may have contributed to delayed convergence in population and output per capita this historic episode provides an unusually rich setting to examine malthusian dynamics highlighting the potential for sustained differences in per capita output in the malthusian era

the cost of road infrastructure in low and middle income countries the connections between transport infrastructure and economic development have been extensively analyzed in previous research but little is known about the cost of infrastructure investments in poor countries this paper examines drivers of unit costs of construction and maintenance of transport infrastructure in low and middle income countries and documents that i there is a large dispersion in unit costs for comparable road work activities ii after accounting for environmental drivers of costs residual unit costs are significantly higher in conflict countries iii there is evidence that costs are higher in countries with higher levels of corruption iv these effects are robust to controlling for a country s public investment capacity and business environment our findings have implications for governments aiming to increase connectivity in poor countries

entrepreneurs risk aversion and dynamic firms how do entrepreneurs vary firm size capital structure and default to manage risk we show that more risk averse entrepreneurs run smaller more highly leveraged firms and default less because running a smaller firm with higher debt reduces personal funds at risk in the firm optimal default depends on ex ante debt consumption forgone from firm liquidation and owner capacity to inject funds we show that entrepreneurs sacrifice current consumption in the hope of future success that never materializes for the bottom 25 percent but entrepreneurship is a path toward great wealth and high consumption for the top quartile

the political economy of public income volatility with an application to the resource curse abstract in recent years many countries have witnessed a great deal of volatility in public budgets be it due to volatility in the access to foreign loans in greece or to unstable oil prices in venezuela we study the political consequences of such public income volatility as is standard in our model political incentives create inefficient policies to increase re election probabilities but we show that making public income uncertain creates specific new effects future volatility reduces the benefit of being in power making policy more efficient yet at the same time it also reduces the re election probability of an incumbent and since some of the policy inefficiencies are concentrated in the future this makes inefficient policy such as patronage public employment less costly our model highlights a new political economy connection between the volatility of the public budget and economic growth in the case where volatility comes from natural resource prices a characteristic of many developing countries we show that volatility in itself may be a source of inefficient resource extraction jointly interacting with increased patronage employment

entrepreneurial drain under moral hazard a high yield sector curse we describe a two sector general equilibrium model of productive sorting under output risk and incomplete information risk neutral entrepreneurial individuals can either produce alone or acting as employers insurers team up with risk averse non entrepreneurial individuals although the latter option has the potential to generate more surplus when effort is unobservable and risk is high the moral hazard problem in mixed matches may be too severe for mixing to be attractive to both risk aversion types leading to a segregated equilibrium in which risk averse individuals select low risk low yield activities an increase in the profitability of the riskier sector can then trigger a switch from a mixed to a segregated equilibrium and cause aggregate output to fall evidence from a panel of non oecd countries showing that the presence of uninsured small scale mining firms has a negative impact on the relationship between natural resource exports and agrarian productivity suggests that this high yield sector curse might be present in natural resource rich low income countries

history path dependence and development evidence from colonial railroads settlers and cities in kenya little is known about the extent and forces of path dependence in developing countries colonial era railroad construction in kenya provides a natural experiment to study the emergence and persistence of spatial equilibrium data spanning over one century shows that railroads determined the location of european settlers asian traders and the main cities at independence europeans then left asians departed and railroads declined in the immediate post independence period constituting local shocks to physical and human capital yet the colonial cities persisted we test four explanations for path dependence based on institutional persistence technological change sunk investments and spatial coordination failures

adverse selection and moral hazard in insurance can dynamic data help to distinguish a standard problem of applied contracts theory is to empirically distinguish between adverse selection and moral hazard we show that dynamic insurance data allow to distinguish moral hazard from dynamic selection on unobservables in the presence of moral hazard experience rating implies negative occurrence dependence individual claim intensities decrease with the number of past claims we discuss econometric tests for the various types of data that are typically available finally we argue that dynamic data also allow to test for adverse selection even if it is based on asymmetric learning jel d82 g22 c41 c14

the logic of political violence this paper offers a unified approach for studying political violence whether it emerges as repression or civil war we formulate a model where an incumbent or opposition can use violence to maintain or acquire power to study which political and economic factors drive one sided or two sided violence repression or civil war the model predicts a hierarchy of violence states from peace via repression to civil war and suggests a natural empirical approach exploiting only within country variation in the data we show that violence is associated with shocks that can affect wages and aid as in the theory these effects are only present where political institutions are non cohesive

separation of powers and political accountability political constitutions are incomplete contracts and therefore leave room for abuse of power in democracies elections are the primary mechanism for disciplining public officials but they are not sufficient separation of powers between executive and legislative bodies also helps to prevent the abuse of power but only with appropriate checks and balances checks and balances work by creating a conflict of interest between the executive and the legislature yet requiring both bodies to agree on public policy in this way the two bodies discipline each other to the voters advantage under appropriate checks and balances separation of powers also helps the voters elicit information

computing multi period information constrained optima this paper presents a detailed theoretical derivation and justification for methods used to compute solutions to a multi period including infinite period continuum agent unobservedeffort economy actual solutions are displayed illustrating cross sectional variability in consumption and labour effort in the population at a point in time and variability for a typical individual over time the optimal tradeoff between insurance and incentives is explored and the issue of excess variability is addressed by consideration of the analogue full information economy and various restricted contracting regimes

de facto political power and institutional persistence much of the empirical work and the conceptual discussion of the impact of institutions on economic development either implicitly or explicitly assumes that institutions persist although acemoglu et al 2001 provide evidence that constraints on the executive persist many aspects of institutions change frequently less developed countries cycle between democracy and dictatorship and often change their constitutions relatedly while the current economic problems in latin america are often traced back to colonial times stanley l engerman and kenneth l sokoloff 1997 acemoglu et al 2002 the specific institutions that once underpinned the colonial economy such as the encomienda the mita or slavery vanished long ago these observations suggest that we need to develop a framework in which changes in certain dimensions of institutions are consistent with overall institutional persistence in this paper we make an attempt to highlight some important mechanisms for understanding simultaneous change and persistence in institutions institutional persistence in this context refers to the persistence of a cluster of economic institutions such as the extent of enforcement of property rights for a broad cross section of society acemoglu et al 2001 such lack of property rights enforcement may be driven by quite different specific institutions e g risk of expropriation entry barriers or economic systems such as serfdom or slavery in turn these different specific economic institutions may exist under different political institutions including dictatorships absolutist monarchies oligarchies and corrupt or even populist democracies given this rich array of possibilities a useful framework must specify which aspects of institutions can change which others have a tendency to persist in equilibrium and how the persistence of certain types of institutions could have lasting effects on economic outcomes in this paper we provide a simple model of the coexistence of change and persistence in institutions first we describe some existing approaches to the persistence of social arrangements as well as the essence of the mechanism we propose next we illustrate the key issues using the experience of the southern united states and last we provide a simple model that formalizes the main mechanism in the paper we conclude by discussing a complementary mechanism to the one presented in this paper

economic growth in a cross section of cities abstract we examine the relationship between urban characteristics in 1960 and urban growth between 1960 and 1990 income and population growth move together and both types of growth are 1 positively related to initial schooling 2 negatively related to initial unemployment and 3 negatively related to the initial share of employment in manufacturing racial composition and segregation are uncorrelated with urban growth across all cities but in cities with large nonwhite communities segregation is positively correlated with population growth government expenditures except for sanitation are uncorrelated with growth government debt is positively correlated with later growth

quality matters the expulsion of professors and the consequences for phd student outcomes in nazi germany i investigate the effect of faculty quality on phd student outcomes to address the endogeneity of faculty quality i use exogenous variation provided by the expulsion of mathematics professors in nazi germany faculty quality is a very important determinant of short and long run phd student outcomes a one standard deviation increase in faculty quality increases the probability of publishing the dissertation in a top journal by 13 percentage points the probability of becoming a full professor by 10 percentage points the probability of having positive lifetime citations by 16 percentage points and the number of lifetime citations by 6 3

dynamic financial constraints distinguishing mechanism design from exogenously incomplete regimes we formulate and solve a range of dynamic models of constrained credit insurance that allow for moral hazard and limited commitment we compare them to full insurance and exogenously incomplete financial regimes autarky saving only borrowing and lending in a single asset we develop computational methods based on mechanism design linear programming and maximum likelihood to estimate compare and statistically test these alternative dynamic models with financial information constraints our methods can use both cross sectional and panel data and allow for measurement error and unobserved heterogeneity we estimate the models using data on thai households running small businesses from two separate samples we find that in the rural sample the exogenously incomplete saving only and borrowing regimes provide the best fit using data on consumption business assets investment and income family and other networks help consumption smoothing there as in a moral hazard constrained regime in contrast in urban areas we find mechanism design financial information regimes that are decidedly less constrained with the moral hazard model fitting best combined business and consumption data we perform numerous robustness checks in both the thai data and in monte carlo simulations and compare our maximum likelihood criterion with results from other metrics and data not used in the estimation a prototypical counterfactual policy evaluation exercise using the estimation results is also featured

distinguishing limited liability from moral hazard in a model of entrepreneurship we present and estimate a model in which the choice between entrepreneurship and wage work may be influenced by financial market imperfections the model allows for limited liability moral hazard and a combination of both constraints the paper uses structural techniques to estimate the model and identify the source of financial market imperfections using data from rural and semiurban households in thailand structural nonparametric and reduced form estimates provide independent evidence that the dominant source of credit market imperfections is moral hazard we reject the hypothesis that limited liability alone can explain the data

urban decline and durable housing urban decline is not the mirror image of growth and durable housing is the primary reason the nature of decline is so different this paper presents a model of urban decline with durable housing and verifies these implications of the model 1 city growth rates are skewed so that cities grow more quickly than they decline 2 urban decline is highly persistent 3 positive shocks increase population more than they increase housing prices 4 negative shocks decrease housing prices more than they decrease population 5 if housing prices are below construction costs then the city declines and 6 the combination of cheap housing and weak labor demand attracts individuals with low levels of human capital to declining cities

inequality the urban rural gap and migration using population and product consumption data from the demographic and health surveys i construct comparable measures of inequality and migration for 65 countries including some of the poorest countries in the world i find that the urban rural gap accounts for 40 of mean country inequality and much of its cross country variation one out of every four or five individuals raised in rural areas moves to urban areas as a young adult where they earn much higher incomes than nonmigrant rural permanent residents equally one out of every four or five individuals raised in urban areas moves to rural areas as a young adult where they earn much lower incomes than their nonmigrant urban cousins these flows and relative incomes are suggestive of a world where the population sorts itself geographically on the basis of its human capital and skill i show that a simple model of this sort explains the urban rural gap in living standards

the role of ports in the making of major cities self agglomeration and hub effect this paper proposes an evolutionary model of spatial economic development in which agglomeration economies and the hub effect of transport nodes interplay in the making of major cities the model explains the irreversibility of spatial economic development such as the continuing prosperity of port cities even after their initial advantage of water access had become irrelevant it is also shown that in order to decentralize industries from the core region to a periphery region a temporary protection of industries in the periphery by worsening the transport connection with the core for a short period of time may be desirable

has democratization reduced infant mortality in sub saharan africa evidence from micro data does democracy help babies survive in sub saharan africa by using retrospective fertility surveys conducted in 28 african countries i compare the survival of infants born to the same mother before and after democratization to disentangle the effect of democracy from that of changes in population characteristics which is infeasible with country level statistics on infant mortality i find that infant mortality falls by 1 2 percentage points 12 of the sample mean after democratization in the post cold war period relevant aspects of democracy appear to be the combination of multiparty elections and leadership change

malaria suitability urbanization and persistence evidence from china over more than 2000 years abstract we show that the climatic potential for plasmodium falciparum malaria transmission constituted a locational fundamental that influenced the spatial distribution of urbanization since the early start of the southward expansion of the han chinese around 200 bce this effect is still detectable in today s distribution of urbanization and economic activity even though the risk of malaria falciparum has been successfully eliminated we do not find any indication of convergence between high and low malaria potential regions after eradication our identification strategy relies on a climate based measure of plasmodium falciparum malaria transmission intensity which is fitted to experimental data on mosquito and parasite development from laboratory studies this measure is exogenous with respect to human population densities

the slave trade and the origins of mistrust in africa in a recent study nunn 2008 examines the long term impacts of africa s slave trade he finds that the slave trade which occurred over a period of more than 400 years had a significant negative effect on long term economic development although the article arguably identifies a negative causal relationship between the slave trade and income today the analysis is unable to establish the exact causal mechanisms underlying this reduced form relationship in this article we examine one of the channels through which the slave trade may affect economic development today combining contemporary individual level survey data with historical data on slave shipments by ethnic group we ask whether the slave trade caused a culture of mistrust to develop within africa initially slaves were captured primarily through state organized raids and warfare but as the trade progressed the environment of ubiquitous insecurity caused individuals to turn on others including friends and family members and to kidnap trick and sell each other into slavery sigismund wilhelm koelle 1854 p e h hair 1965 charles piot 1996 we hypothesize that in this environment a culture of mistrust may have evolved which may persist to this day we show that current differences in trust levels within africa can be traced back to the transatlantic and indian ocean slave trades combining contemporary individual level survey data with historical data on slave shipments by ethnic group we find that individuals whose ancestors were heavily raided during the slave trade are less trusting today evidence from a variety of identification strategies suggests that the relationship is causal examining causal mechanisms we show that most of the impact of the slave trade is through factors that are internal to the individual such as cultural norms beliefs and values jel j15 n57 z13

social structure and development a legacy of the holocaust in russia we document a statistical association between the severity of the persecution displacement and mass murder of jews by the nazis during world war ii and long run economic and political outcomes within russia cities that experienced the holocaust most intensely have grown less and both cities and administrative districts oblasts where the holocaust had the largest impact have worse economic and political outcomes since the collapse of the soviet union we provide evidence that the lasting impact of the holocaust may be attributable to a permanent change it induced in the social structure across different regions of russia

repeated moral hazard and recursive lagrangeans dynamic agency models with endogenous state variables or many agents are numerically intractable or at least very difficult to solve this problem prevented researchers from analizying an important class of economic problems e g extensions of the basic unemployment insurance framework models of international risk sharing in production economies with private information and optimal executive compensation schemes in this paper i show how to solve these models by building a general theoretical framework for the analysis of repeated moral hazard problems the main contribution is the extension of the recursive

some effects of business environment on retail firms abstractthis paper empirically tests how formal retail entrepreneurs perception about the business environment in cameroon affects the performance of the retail sector i use business owners responses from the 2009 enterprise survey to estimate an econometric model that corrects for heteroscedasticity the results show that regulation costs corruption credit constraints and lack of infrastructure negatively affect the gross margins of firms in contrast the competition of the informal sector perceived by many formal entrepreneurs as a major constraint is positively associated with the gross margins of formal firms policy implications are discussed

ethnic diversity and economic development abstract this paper analyzes the role that different indices and dimensions of ethnicity play in the process of economic development firstly we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of alternative data sources for the construction of indices of religious and ethnic heterogeneity secondly we compare the index of fractionalization and the index of polarization we argue that an index of the family of discrete polarization measures is the adequate indicator to measure potential conflict we find that ethnic religious polarization has a large and negative effect on economic development through the reduction of investment and the increase of government consumption and the probability of a civil conflict

enfranchising your own experimental evidence on bureaucrat diversity and election bias in india this paper investigates the effects of polling station administrator diversity on elections in india using a natural experiment the random assignment of government officials to teams managing stations on election day together with surveys conducted with voters and election officers i demonstrate that changes in the religious and caste composition of officer teams impact voting at the polling station level causing shifts in coalition vote shares large enough to influence election outcomes effects are strongest when officers have greater discretion over the voting process i also provide evidence suggesting own group favoritism by election personnel as one relevant mechanism

the ethnic logic of campaign strategy in diverse societies theory and evidence from kenya much of the existing ethnic politics literature suggests that in settings where ethnicity is politically salient electoral competition encourages rival parties to focus narrowly on mobilizing thei

the global spatial distribution of economic activity nature history and the role of trade we explore the role of natural characteristics in determining the worldwide spatial distribution of economic activity as proxied by lights at night observed across 240 000 grid cells a parsimonious set of 24 physical geography attributes explains 47 of worldwide variation and 35 of within country variation in lights we divide geographic characteristics into two groups those primarily important for agriculture and those primarily important for trade and confront a puzzle in examining within country variation in lights among countries that developed early agricultural variables incrementally explain over 6 times as much variation in lights as do trade variables while among late developing countries the ratio is only about 1 5 even though the latter group is far more dependent on agriculture correspondingly the marginal effects of agricultural variables as a group on lights are larger in absolute value and those for trade smaller for early developers than for late developers we show that this apparent puzzle is explained by persistence and the differential timing of technological shocks in the two sets of countries for early developers structural transformation due to rising agricultural productivity began when transport costs were still high so cities were localized in agricultural regions when transport costs fell these agglomerations persisted in late developing countries transport costs fell before structural transformation to exploit urban scale economies manufacturing agglomerated in relatively few often coastal locations consistent with this explanation countries that developed earlier are more spatially equal in their distribution of education and economic activity than late developers

evaluation of financial liberalization a general equilibrium model with constrained occupation choice the objective of this paper is to assess both the aggregate growth effects and the distributional consequences of financial liberalization as observed in thailand from 1976 to 1996 a general equilibrium occupational choice model with two sectors one without intermediation and the other with borrowing and lending is taken to thai data key parameters of the production technology and the distribution of entrepreneurial talent are estimated by maximizing the likelihood of transition into business given initial wealth as observed in two distinct datasets other parameters of the model are calibrated to try to match the two decades of growth as well as observed changes in inequality labor share savings and the number of entrepreneurs without an expansion in the size of the intermediated sector thailand would have evolved very differently namely with a drastically lower growth rate high residual subsistence sector non increasing wages but lower inequality the financial liberalization brings welfare gains and losses to different subsets of the population primary winners are talented would be entrepreneurs who lack credit and cannot otherwise go into business or invest little capital mean gains for these winners range from 17 to 34 percent of observed overall average household income but liberalization also induces greater demand by entrepreneurs for workers resulting in increases in the wage and lower profits of relatively rich entrepreneurs of the same order of magnitude as the observed overall average income of firm owners foreign capital has no significant impact on growth or the distribution of observed income

separating moral hazard from adverse selection and learning in automobile insurance longitudinal evidence from france the identification of information problems in different markets is a challenging issue in the economic literature this paper performs tests of residual asymmetric information in the french automobile insurance market for the 1995 1997 period this market is characterized by the presence of a regulated experiencerating scheme bonus malus contract choices are strongly associated with the bonus malus of policyholders we have access to longitudinal survey data with dynamic information both on claims and accidents we propose a causality test to distinguish pathways through which a positive correlation arises between contract choice and accidents we find evidence of moral hazard among a sub group of policyholders with significant driving experience 5 15 years we distinguish this moral hazard estimate from adverse selection and learning policyholders with less experience have a combination of learning and moral hazard whereas no residual information problem is found for policyholders with more than 15 years of experience

ethnic diversity social sanctions and public goods in kenya abstract this paper examines ethnic diversity and local public goods in rural western kenya the identification strategy relies on the stable historically determined patterns of ethnic land settlement ethnic diversity is associated with lower primary school funding and worse school facilities and there is suggestive evidence that it leads to poor water well maintenance the theoretical model illustrates how inability to impose social sanctions in diverse communities leads to collective action failures and we find that school committees in diverse areas do impose fewer sanctions on defaulting parents we relate these results to the literature on social capital and economic development and discuss implications for decentralization in less developed countries

internal borders ethnic based market segmentation in malawi summary ethnic diversity is associated with poorer economic development but why i argue that market segmentation is one mechanism linking diversity to economic underdevelopment when ethnic groups are geographically segregated and trust is concentrated within groups markets will be tend to be segmented along ethnic lines i evaluate this argument using maize price data from seventy malawian markets over 14 years and combine it with census data on the spatial distribution of ethnic groups i find that maize price differences a key indicator of market segmentation are indeed larger for ethnically dissimilar markets even after taking sub national administrative borders geographic barriers and climatic differences into account these statistical findings are complemented by interview data from farmers and traders in three markets across malawi which highlight the centrality of trust in small scale maize trading as well as a preference for coethnic trading partners together these findings suggest that ethnic diversity and ethnoregional segregation in particular can have a negative impact on market integration an important driver of food security and long term economic development

international isolation and regional inequality evidence from sanctions on north korea abstract this paper examines how the spatial distribution of economic activity evolved within north korea during a period of economic sanctions countries have used economic sanctions to isolate north korea from the benefits of international trade and finance china however has not imposed the sanctions and consequentially has offset the trade restrictions imposed by other countries i hypothesize three channels by which north korea could have responded in this context regional favoritism by the ruling elites reallocation of commerce that reflects the trade diversion to china and import substitution using nighttime lights from north korea i find that the capital city trade hubs near china and manufacturing cities become relatively brighter when sanctions increase however production shifts away from capital intensive goods potentially deterring industrial development the results imply that despite the intention to target the ruling elites sanctions may increase regional inequality at a cost to the already marginalized hinterlands

the control of politicians in divided societies the politics of fear autocrats in many developing countries have extracted enormous personal rents from power in addition they have imposed inefficient policies including pervasive patronage spending i present a model in which the presence of ethnic identities and the absence of institutionalized succession processes allow the ruler to elicit support from a sizeable share of the population despite large reductions in welfare the fear of falling under an equally inefficient and venal ruler that favours another group is enough to discipline supporters the model predicts extensive use of patronage ethnic bias in taxation and spending patterns and unveils a new mechanism through which economic frictions translate into increased rent extraction by the leader these predictions are consistent with the experiences of bad governance ethnic bias wasteful policies and kleptocracy in post colonial africa

welfare implications of oligopoly in u s food manufacturing a statistical procedure is used to show that increased concentration in u s food manufacturing industries is associated with increased total input productivity a price leadership model is employed in order to estimate total welfare loss if an elasticity of 1 is assumed deadweight loss to society is estimated at 0 5 of food value if an elasticity of 0 5 is assumed total loss to consumers amounts to 6 11 of food value which is 10 billion in 1975 the increase in total factor productivity which is linked to concentration is roughly sufficient to offset the entire loss to consumers

the value of democracy evidence from road building in kenya ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development this paper provides credible quantification of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in kenyan districts across the 1963 2011 period guided by a model it then examines whether the transition in and out of democracy under the same president constrains or exacerbates ethnic favoritism across the post independence period we find strong evidence of ethnic favoritism districts that share the ethnicity of the president receive twice as much expenditure on roads and have five times the length of paved roads built this favoritism disappears during periods of democracy jel d72 h54 j15 o15 o17 o22 r42

the demarcation of land and the role of coordinating property institutions we use a natural experiment in nineteenth century ohio to analyze the economic effects of two dominant land demarcation regimes metes and bounds mb and the rectangular system rs mb is decentralized with plot shapes alignment and sizes defined individually rs is a centralized grid of uniform square plots that does not vary with topography we find large initial net benefits in land values from the rs and also that these effects persist into the twenty first century these findings reveal the importance of transaction costs and networks in affecting property rights land values markets and economic growth

access to capital in rural thailand an estimated model of formal versus informal credit the aim of this paper is to understand the mechanism underlying access to credit the author focuses on two important aspects of rural credit markets in thailand first moneylenders and other informal lenders coexist with formal lending institutions such as government or commercial banks and more recently micro lending institutions second potential borrowers presumably face sizable transaction costs obtaining external credit the author develops and estimates a model based on limited enforcement and transaction costs that provides a unified view of those facts the results show that the limited ability of banks to enforce contracts more than transaction costs is crucial in understanding the observed diversity of lenders

financial constraints and occupational choice in thai villages abstract financial constraints and entrepreneurship are key factors affecting economic performance in developing countries i formulate and solve a model of occupational choice with moral hazard under three alternative financial market environments savings only borrowing and lending with default and moral hazard constrained insurance i use computationally efficient techniques based on mechanism design genetic algorithms and maximum likelihood to estimate and statistically test these models of financial constraints using occupational choice data from thai villages i find evidence that the saving only regime is rejected in favor of regimes allowing for borrowing and or insurance especially in higher wealth data stratifications a direct test between the borrowing and insurance regimes reveals that neither can be rejected in favor of the other allowing ex ante lotteries over wealth improves the explanatory power of the model i also find evidence for differences in the best fitting regimes by region wealth and access to formal credit

endogenous capital market imperfections human capital and intergenerational mobility in this paper capital market imperfections are endogenized considering an adverse selection problem between banks and borrowers we develop a growth model with linear olg wealth dynamics where agents are heterogeneous in terms of observable wealth and ability which is private information we show that banks react to this informational asymmetry by granting higher loans to talented borrowers this in turn helps poor and talented agents to become educated and catch up with the rich agents furthermore the credit market friction leads to greater human capital accumulation

re election incentives and deforestation cycles in the brazilian amazon abstract despite expansive research on amazonian deforestation and its drivers the role of local politics is not well understood using a panel data set that combines municipal level deforestation and election data from 2002 to 2012 i estimate the effect of an incumbent mayor running for re election on deforestation rates in election periods i find that deforestation rates increase 8 10 in election years when an incumbent mayor runs for re election an amount equivalent to four percent of the total forest lost since the 2004 elections electoral deforestation cycles do not appear to be driven by changes in agricultural policy implementation and activity but are linked to corruption and campaign finance suggesting that weak institutional constraints facilitate electoral manipulation of forest resources this phenomenon is not likely limited to amazonian forests re election incentives could very well lead to misallocation of other natural resources in alternate geographies

the permanent effects of transportation revolutions in poor countries evidence from africa we exploit the construction and eventual demise of the colonial railroads in africa to study the impact of transportation investments in poor countries using ghana and sub saharan africa as a whole we assembled new data on railroads and cities spanning over one century to show that i railroads had large effects on the spatial distribution and aggregate level of economic activity during the colonial period as they constituted a transportation revolution in a context where no modern transportation technology previously existed ii these effects have persisted to date although railroads collapsed and road networks expanded considerably in the post independence period the analysis contributes to our understanding of the heterogeneous impact of transportation investments it shows that initial investments may have a large effect in poor countries with basic infrastructure as the countries develop increasing returns may then solidify their spatial distribution and subsequent investments may have a smaller effect on local economic development

spatial wage disparities sorting matters spatial wage disparities can result from spatial differences in the skill composition of the workforce in non human endowments and in local interactions to distinguish between these explanations we estimate a model of wage determination across local labour markets using a very large panel of french workers we control for worker characteristics worker fixed effects industry fixed effects and the characteristics of the local labour market our findings suggest that individual skills account for a large fraction of existing spatial wage disparities with strong evidence of spatial sorting by skills interaction effects are mostly driven by the local density of employment not controlling for worker heterogeneity leads to very biased estimates of interaction effects endowments only appear to play a small role

independent candidates and political representation in india we estimate the causal effect of independent candidates on voter turnout and election outcomes in india to do this we exploit exogenous changes in the entry deposit candidates pay for their participation in the political process changes that disproportionately excluded candidates with no affiliation to established political parties a one standard deviation increase in the number of independent candidates increases voter turnout by more than 6 percentage points as some voters choose to vote rather than stay home the vote share of independent candidates increases by more than 10 percentage points as some existing voters switch who they vote for thus independents allow winning candidates to win with less vote share decrease the probability of electing a candidate from the governing coalition by about 31 percentage points and ultimately increase the probability of electing an ethnic party candidate altogether the results imply that the price of participation by independents is constituency representation in government

state capacity conflict and development the absence of state capacities to raise revenue and to support markets is a key factor in explaining the persistence of weak states this paper reports on an ongoing project to investigate the incentive to invest in such capacities the paper sets out a simple analytical structure in which state capacities are modeled as forward looking investments by government the approach highlights some determinants of state building including the risk of external or internal conflict the degree of political instability and dependence on natural resources throughout we link these state capacity investments to patterns of development and growth

risk sharing with limited commitment and preference heterogeneity structural estimation and testing in order to analyze the role of limited commitment and preference heterogeneity in explaining the consumption allocation i propose a theoretical and empirical framework to estimate and evaluate a risk sharing model where insurance transfers have to be self enforcing and the coefficient of relative risk aversion may depend on observable household characteristics i compare this model to benchmark models with full commitment and or without preference heterogeneity using data from three indian villages i find that the limited commitment model with heterogeneous preferences outperforms the benchmark models in a statistical sense and in terms of i explaining the dynamic response of consumption to idiosyncratic income shocks ii accounting for the variation of consumption unexplained by household and time effects and iii capturing the variation of inequality across time and villages and predicting changes in inequality i also use the estimated models to predict the effects of a counterfactual tax and transfer policy on the consumption allocation the limited commitment model with preference heterogeneity predicts larger benefits to the poor than its homogeneous counterpart

the political economy of government responsiveness theory and evidence from india the determinants of government responsiveness to its citizens is a key issue in political economy here we develop a model based on the solution of political agency problems having a more informed an politically active electorate strengthens incentives for governments to be responsive this suggests that there is a role both for democratic institutions and the mass media in ensuring that the preferences of citizens are reflected in policy the ideas behind the model are tested on panel data from india we show that public food distribution and calamity relief expenditure are greater controlling for shocks where governments face greater electoral accountability and where newspaper circulation is highest

money flows water trickles understanding patterns of decentralized water provision in tanzania summary over the past three decades an increasing number of low and middle income countries have decentralized water provision to the local government level and have sought to more thoroughly involve users in service delivery such reforms reflect the twin goals of encouraging greater responsiveness to local needs and promoting sustainability this study illustrates how the aims of decentralization can be undermined in the absence of robust democratic competition and how governments interpret demand by voters in such settings focusing on the tanzanian water sector the paper first traces the distribution of money for water from the central government to the district level next i consider how district governments use these funds to distribute water infrastructure within their jurisdictions using geo referenced data on all 75 000 water points serving rural tanzanians i find that the central government s allocation of money to districts is fairly unresponsive to local needs however the pattern of distribution cannot primarily be explained by politics with the exception of consistent favoritism of the minister for water s home district political favoritism is more pronounced at the local level within districts the distribution of new water infrastructure is skewed to favor localities with higher demonstrated levels of support for the ruling party in addition wealthier and better connected communities those with the resources to more effectively express their demands are significantly more likely to benefit from new construction this suggests that demand responsive approaches to water provision can entrench regressive patterns of distribution

enterprise inequality and economic development we characterize an equilibrium development process driven by the interaction of the distribution of wealth with credit constraints and the distribution of entrepreneurial skills when efficient entrepreneurs are relatively abundant a traditional development process emerges in which the evolution of macroeconomic variables accord with empirical regularities and income inequality traces out a kuznets curve if instead efficient entrepreneurs are relatively scarce the model generates long run distributional cycles driven by the endogenous interaction between credit constraints entrepreneurial efficiency and equilibrium wages

village and larger economies the theory and measurement of the townsend thai project i have spent close to 20 years cataloging transactions between households in thai villages along with a research team just this past summer we documented a number of ways in which even relatively poor villages have money markets not dissimilar in some ways from new york financial markets with borrowing and repayment passing along links in credit chains in another project we have been looking at month by month school attendance grade level completion and graduation for children in these villages following them from birth to graduation the townsend thai project is a theory based data collection endeavor measuring and mapping village and larger economies into general equilibrium frameworks this paper reviews a number of findings implications applications and lessons learned and considers next steps

electoral motives and the subnational allocation of foreign aid in sub saharan africa abstract this paper examines how electoral motives shape the subnational allocation of foreign aid commitments by employing a newly constructed geocoded dataset for 14 sub saharan african countries over the period 2000 2012 our results provide strong evidence of a core voter strategy african leaders diverting chinese aid towards regions with a high concentration of political supporters however no evidence of such preferential treatment is found for world bank aid suggesting that aid from traditional donors is less vulnerable to political manipulation our results also reveal that checks and balances in recipient countries are an important mediating factor of aid misallocation while copartisan regions receive larger amounts of chinese aid in environments with weak checks and balances these effects disappear when stronger checks and balances are in place this paper also offers case study evidence from ghana exploiting the 2009 regime change in ghana and using a difference in differences framework we provide further support of copartisan targeting and confirm that chinese aid is more manipulable than world bank aid in this respect

financial development growth and the distribution of income a paradigm is presented in which both the extent of financial intermediation and the rate of economic growth are endogenously determined financial intermediation promotes growth because it allows a higher rate of return to be earned on capital and growth in turn provides the means to implement costly financial structures thus financial intermediation and economic growth are inextricably linked in accord with the goldsmith mckinnon shaw view on economic development the model also generates a development cycle reminiscent of the kuznet hypothesis in particular in the transition from a primitive slow growing economy to a developed fast growing one a nation passes through a stage in which the distribution of wealth across the rich and poor widens

tax me if you can ethnic geography democracy and the taxation of agriculture in africa it is typically assumed that african leaders enact policies that benefit their ethnoregional group using all types of patronage crop production and political power are geographically concentrated in many african countries and this paper exploits this overlap to cast doubt on this conventional wisdom it shows using data on 50 country crop combinations that cash crop farmers who are ethnically identified with the head of state face higher taxes furthermore democratic regimes impose lower taxes this paper shows that farmers who have few alternatives face higher taxes african leaders have used local intermediaries to exert control over the countryside and to ensure that farmers do not support alternative candidates it suggests that as leaders are better at selecting and monitoring these intermediaries in their home areas they can extract more from the majority at home than abroad using taxes on cash crops which are regionally but not individually targetable

the development effects of the extractive colonial economy the dutch cultivation system in java colonial powers typically organized economic activity in the colonies to maximize their economic returns while the literature has emphasized long run negative economic impacts via institutional quality the changes in economic organization implemented to spur production historically could also directly influence economic organization in the long run exerting countervailing effects we examine these in the context of the dutch cultivation system the integrated industrial and agricultural system for producing sugar that formed the core of the dutch colonial enterprise in 19th century java we show that areas close to where the dutch established sugar factories in the mid 19th century are today more industrialized have better infrastructure are more educated and are richer than nearby counterfactual locations that would have been similarly suitable for colonial sugar factories we also show using a spatial regression discontinuity design on the catchment areas around each factory that villages forced to grow sugar cane have more village owned land and also have more schools and substantially higher education levels both historically and today the results suggest that the economic structures implemented by colonizers to facilitate production can continue to promote economic activity in the long run and we discuss the contexts where such effects are most likely to be important

pareto optima and competitive equilibria with adverse selection and moral hazard this paper explores the extent to which standard general equilibrium analysis of pareto optima and of competitive equilibria can be applied to environments with moral hazard and adverse selection problems allowing for lotteries contracts with random components we first establish that an adverse selection insurance economy a moral hazard insurance economy a signaling economy and a private information labor market economy are all special cases of a simple general structure we then show that techniques for characterizing pareto optimal contracts as solutions to concave programming problems are useful and nice and appear to be broadly applicable allowing for lotteries we show how to characterize the optimal allocations for the adverse selection insurance and labor market economies we then show that standard existence and optimality theorems for competitive equilibria apply in the linear space containing lotteries if agents with characteristics which are distinct and privately observed at the time of initial trading enter the economy wide resource constraints in a homogeneous way other kinds of diversity are not critical for economies with moral hazard which satisfy the homogeneity condition competitive contract markets single out a subset of the optima and thus can be consistent with apparent unemployment and with a random allocation of labor supplied though all households are averse to risk the adverse selection insurance and signaling economies however do not satisfy the homogeneity condition and are difficult to decentralize efficiently with a price system

cities skills and regional change glaeser e l ponzetto g a m and tobio k cities skills and regional change regional studies one approach to urban areas emphasizes the existence of certain immutable relationships such as zipf s or gibrat s law an alternative view is that urban change reflects individual responses to changing tastes or technologies this paper examines almost 200 years of regional change in the united states and finds that few if any growth relationships remain constant including gibrat s law education does a reasonable job of explaining urban resilience in recent decades but it does not seem to predict county growth a century ago after reviewing this evidence a simple model of regional change is presented and estimated where education increases the level of entrepreneurship human capital spillovers occur at the city level because skilled workers produce more product varieties and thereby increase labour demand it is found that skills are associated with growth in productivity or entrepreneurship not

party connections interest groups and the slow diffusion of infrastructure evidence from britain s first transport revolution economic and political interests often block or delay infrastructure improvements this paper examines their effects by studying britain s river navigation improvements in the early 1700s a subject of intense lobbying in parliament it shows that stronger party connections and influence in neighboring areas likely to oppose or support projects affected whether a town got a river navigation act their estimated effects are comparable to geography and town economic characteristics in magnitude and help explain whether towns were blocked from getting navigation improvements the findings address institutions following the glorious revolution and broader issues concerning infrastructure technology diffusion and political connections this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

legal origins and female hiv more than one half of all people living with hiv are women and 80 percent of all hiv positive women in the world live in sub saharan africa this paper demonstrates that the legal origins of these formerly colonized countries significantly determine current day female hiv rates in particular female hiv rates are significantly higher in common law sub saharan african countries compared to civil law ones this paper explains this relationship by focusing on differences in female property rights under the two codes of law in sub saharan africa common law is associated with weaker female marital property laws as a result women in these common law countries have lower bargaining power within the household and are less able to negotiate safe sex practices and are thus more vulnerable to hiv compared to their civil law counterparts exploiting the fact that some ethnic groups in sub saharan africa cross country borders with different legal systems we are able to include ethnicity fixed effects into a regression discontinuity approach this allows us to control for a large set of cultural geographical and environmental factors that could be confounding the estimates the results of this paper are consistent with gender inequality the feminization of aids explaining much of its prevalence in sub saharan africa

credit market consequences of improved personal identification field experimental evidence from malawi we implemented a randomized field experiment in malawi examining borrower responses to being fingerprinted when applying for loans this intervention improved the lender s ability to implement dynamic repayment incentives allowing it to withhold future loans from past defaulters while rewarding good borrowers with better loan terms as predicted by a simple model fingerprinting led to substantially higher repayment rates for borrowers with the highest ex ante default risk but had no effect for the rest of the borrowers we provide unique evidence that this improvement in repayment rates is accompanied by behaviors consistent with less adverse selection and lower moral hazard jel d14 d82 g21 o12 o16

a theory of trickle down growth and development this paper develops a model of growth and income inequalities in the presence of imperfect capital markets and it analyses the trickle down effect of capital accumulation moral hazard with limited wealth constraints on the part of the borrowers is the source of both capital market imperfections and the emergence of persistent income inequalities three main conclusions are obtained from this model first when the rate of capital accumulation is sufficiently high the economy converges to a unique invariant wealth distribution second even though the trickle down mechanism can lead to a unique steady state distribution under laissez faire there is room for government intervention in particular redistribution of wealth from rich lenders to poor and middle class borrowers improves the production efficiency of the economy both because it brings about greater equality of opportunity and also because it accelerates the trickle down process third the process of capital accumulation initially has the effect of widening inequalities but in later stages it reduces them in other words this model can generate a kuznets curve

the benefits of lending relationships evidence from small business data this paper empirically examines how ties between a firm and its creditors affect the availability and cost of funds to the firm we analyze data collected in a survey of small firms by the small business administration the primary benefit of building close ties with an institutional creditor is that the availability of financing increases we find smaller effects on the price of credit attempts to widen the circle of relationships by borrowing from multiple lenders increases the price and reduces the availability of credit in sum relationships are valuable and appear to operate more through quantities rather than prices

the mission human capital transmission economic persistence and culture in south america this article examines the long term consequences of a historical human capital intervention the jesuit order founded religious missions in 1609 among the guarani in modern day argentina brazil and paraguay before their expulsion in 1767 missionaries instructed indigenous inhabitants in reading writing and various crafts using archival records as well as data at the individual and municipal level i show that in areas of former jesuit presence within the guarani area educational attainment was higher and remains so by 10 15 250 years later these educational differences have also translated into incomes that are 10 higher today the identification of the positive effect of the guarani jesuit missions emerges after comparing them with abandoned jesuit missions and neighboring franciscan guarani missions the enduring effects observed are consistent with transmission mechanisms of structural transformation occupational specialization and technology adoption in agriculture

risk sharing and information in village economies arrangements for achieving efficient risk sharing vary depending on the information available to agents in the economy the usual euler equation restricts efficient allocations in an economy which obeys the permanent income hypothesis while efficient allocations in an economy with private information and long term contracts satisfy a symmetric restriction but not the euler equation full insurance arrangements are unique in that they satisfy both restrictions we look at an environment in which it seems likely that long term contracts play a role in mitigating the effects of private information three village economies in south india the evidence that consumption allocations satisfy the private information restriction is quite strong for households in two of the three villages the evidence for the third village suggests that while consumption for some households satisfies the private information restrictions other households consumption obey the permanent income hypothesis