Showing papers in "Journal of Development Economics in 2011"

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors make the case that using a single baseline and single follow-up survey is not optimal for measuring noisy and relatively less autocorrelated outcomes such as business profits, household incomes and expenditures, and episodic health outcomes.

TL;DR: In this paper, a simple model of income maximization can account for both positive selection and positive sorting of international labor movements, showing that the more educated are more likely to emigrate (positive selection) and more educated migrants are more to settle in destination countries with high rewards to skill.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the relationship between remittances and the aggregate level of deposits and credit intermediated by the local banking sector and provided evidence of a positive, significant, and robust link between remittance flows and financial development in developing countries.

TL;DR: The authors showed that agriculture is significantly more effective in reducing poverty among the poorest of the poor (as reflected in the $1-day squared poverty gap) than non-agriculture.

TL;DR: This article examined the effects of aid on the growth of manufacturing, using a methodology that exploits the variation within countries and across manufacturing sectors, and corrects for possible reverse causality, finding that aid inflows have systematic adverse effects on a country's competitiveness, as reflected in the lower relative growth rate of exportable industries.

TL;DR: The authors used differences in regional and temporal exposure to the 1992-1998 armed conflict in Tajikistan to study the effect of violent conflict on schooling outcomes and found that exposure to violent conflict had a large and statistically significant negative effect on the enrollment of girls.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors studied whether and how the success of micro-finance institutions depends on the country-level context, in particular macroeconomic and macro-institutional features.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate and compare countries' export growth based on their performance at the extensive and intensive export margins, and find that developing countries would experience significantly higher export growth if they were able to improve their performance with respect to the two key components of the intensive margin: survival and deepening.

TL;DR: The authors investigated the impact of U.S. bombing on later economic development in Vietnam and found that even the most intense bombing in human history did not generate local poverty traps in Vietnam.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluated the short-term impact of Rwanda's land tenure regularization program and found that it had a very large impact on investment and maintenance of soil conservation measures.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a model that explains migrations as decisions that respond to where human capital can be acquired more efficiently, and where the return to human capital is highest.

TL;DR: In this paper, the relationship between land tenure and agricultural investment in West Africa has been investigated, and the authors found that self-reported tenure security has been a poor predictor of investment outcomes.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors combine data from the 2002 National Population Census and the distribution of the number of human rights violations and victims across 22 departments to examine how Guatemala's 36-year-long civil war affected human capital accumulation.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the extent to which liquidity constraints affect firms' assets growth and found that state owned enterprises are not affected, while the availability of internal finance represents a binding constraint for the growth of private firms, especially those operating in coastal regions, with negligible foreign ownership.

TL;DR: In this article, the role of land measurement error in the inverse farm size and productivity relationship was revisited, in which self-reported land size information is complemented by plot measurements collected using Global Position System devices.

TL;DR: In this article, a theoretical framework was developed to examine the relationship between land tenure arrangements and households' investment in soil-improving and conservation measures and analyzed this relationship with a multivariate probit model based on detailed plot-level data from villages in the Brong Ahafo region of Ghana.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors exploit an extensive Brazilian micro-enterprise survey and the 1996 introduction of a business tax reduction and simplification scheme (SIMPLES) to examine three questions: do high tax rates and complex tax regulations really constitute a barrier to the formalization of micro-firms? And does formalization improve firm performance measured along several dimensions, including revenues, employment and capital stock?

TL;DR: The main result of the paper is that a relative increase in female income weakens the family's ties to the ancestral community and the traditional economy, but these mobility enhancing effects are obtained for certain historically disadvantaged castes alone.

TL;DR: In this paper, the co-movement and determinants of commodity prices were investigated using nonstationary panel methods, and a statistically significant degree of comovement due to a common factor was found.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the questions of what determines success and survival beyond the first year and find that survival probability rises with the number of firms exporting the same product to the same destination from the same country, pointing towards the existence of cross-firm synergies.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluated the impacts of the Ethiopian Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) on rural households' holdings of livestock and forest assets/trees and found no indication that participation in PSNP...

TL;DR: The results suggest that grade progression in African schools is poorly linked to actual ability and learning, and point to the importance of considering the stochastic component of grade repetition in analyzing school systems with high failure rates.

TL;DR: The authors found that the implications of status seeking for spending are not unidimensional, they vary across income groups and expenditure categories, and consistent with theories of rank-based status seeking, the poor increase spending on funerals and gifts as competition for status intensifies.

TL;DR: The authors investigated macro and micro correlates of aid-financed development project outcomes, using data from over 6000 World Bank projects evaluated between 1983 and 2011, and found that country-level measures of the quality of policies and institutions are strongly correlated with project outcomes.

TL;DR: The length of the recall period had a large impact on reported morbidity, doctor visits; time spent sick; whether at least one day of work/school was lost due to sickness and; the reported use of self-medication.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors build on the methodology used to construct poverty maps to show how repeated cross-sections of household survey data can allow inferences to be made about movements in and out of poverty.

TL;DR: In this article, the importance of conditionality on human capital formation, school enrollment, using data collected during the evaluation of Mexico's PROGRESA program was investigated, showing that the absence of these forms reduced the likelihood that children attended school with this effect most pronounced when children were transitioning to lower secondary school.

TL;DR: This article examined the impact of default on growth using quarterly data and found that output contractions precede defaults and that output starts growing after the quarter in which the default took place, indicating that default episodes mark the beginning of the economic recovery and that negative effects of a default on output are likely to be driven by the anticipation of default, independently of whether or not the country ultimately decides to validate it.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the effect of recall bias on the quality of agricultural data collected by asking respondents to recall the details of events occurring during past agricultural seasons that took place a number of months prior to the interview and found that more salient events are less subject to recall decay.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate the short and long-run causal effects of hosting refugees on outcomes of local children and find that intra-and inter-cohort variation in childhood exposure to the refugee crisis reduced height in early adulthood by 1.8 cm (1.2%), schooling by 0.2 years (7.1%), and literacy by 7 percentage points (8.6%).