Showing papers in "Journal of Development Economics in 2015"

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors randomly gave access to bank accounts with zero fees at local bank-branches to a large sample of female household heads in Nepal and found that zero fees and physical proximity of the bank led to high take-up and usage rates compared to similar studies in other settings.

TL;DR: The authors evaluated the impact of major natural resource discoveries since 1950 on GDP per capita using panel fixed-effects estimation and resource discoveries in countries that were not previously resource-rich as a plausibly exogenous source of variation.

TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of explosive growth in the Bangladeshi ready-made garments industry on the lives on Bangladesh women were studied. And they found that women who gain greater access to garment sector jobs to women living further away from factories, to years before the factories arrive close to some villages, and to the marriage and enrollment decisions of their male siblings.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used DHS data to test nine hypotheses about the prevalence and decline of polygamy in Africa, and found that historical inequality better predicts polygamy today than current inequality.

TL;DR: The authors conducted an extensive review of the disparate literature studying the stability of preferences measured in experiments and found no systematic evidence that real world shocks influence play in games, and suggested that in a developing country context researchers should explore designing simpler experiments and including survey questions in addition to experiments to measure preferences.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used a panel of 23,000 energy-intensive, Chinese firms from 1999 to 2004 to examine how firms responded to severe power shortages in the early 2000s.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine how fiscal incentives affect the policy choices of local governments in the context of China and find evidence that local governments shifted their efforts from fostering industrial growth to "urbanizing" China, i.e., to developing the real estate and construction sectors, when their retention rate of enterprise tax revenue was reduced.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the first value-added models of learning production in private and government schools in India using unique panel data from Andhra Pradesh state, and examine the heterogeneity in private school value added across different subjects, urban and rural areas, medium of instruction, and across age groups.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors combine new disaggregated aid data and various metrics of political institutions to re-examine this relationship and conclude that the data do not support the view that aid has had a systematic negative effect on political institutions.

TL;DR: This paper used data on dam construction to identify districts that are downstream from irrigation dams and show that income in these areas is much less sensitive to rainfall fluctuations. But, rain shocks remain equally strong predictors of riot incidence in these districts.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present new data on the micro structure of the export sector for 45 countries and study how exporter behavior varies with country size and stage of development, concluding that the extensive margin plays a greater role than the intensive margin in supporting exports of larger countries.

TL;DR: The authors examined the impact of gender-progressive reforms to the inheritance law in India on women's outcomes and found that despite stipulating that daughters would have equal shares as sons in ancestral property, the reform failed to increase the actual likelihood of women inheriting property.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors highlight the importance of natural resource concentration and ethnic group regional concentration for ethnic conflict and show that the existence of multiple conflict terrains is the source of bargaining failure, similar to the one determined by the presence of offensive advantages.

TL;DR: The authors measured the effects of trade liberalization over the period of 1993-2002 on regional poverty levels in 259 Indonesian districts, and investigated the labor market mechanisms behind these effects, finding that low-skilled work participation and middle-skilled wages were more responsive to reductions in import tariffs on intermediate goods than to reduction in import tariff on final outputs.

TL;DR: In this paper, a slow-growing resource sector is identified as a surprising feature of resource-rich economies and it is often argued that natural-resource production impedes development by creating market or institutional failures.

TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of the 1970 Ancash earthquake on human capital accumulation on the affected and subsequent generation, 37 years after the shock, using Peruvian census of 1993 and 2007.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate how social learning influences demand for a resource-conserving technology in eastern Uttar Pradesh, India and find that having a benefiting adopter in one's network increased demand by over 50%, whereas having a non-benefiting adopter had no effect.

TL;DR: The authors used the Indonesian Family Life Survey to study the persistent effects of in utero exposure to Ramadan over the life cycle and found that exposed children perform more child labor, score 7.4% lower on cognitive tests and 8.4%) lower on math test scores.

TL;DR: This paper analyzed a randomized trial of an innovative anti-poverty program in South India, part of a series of pilot programs that provide "ultra-poor" households with inputs to create new, sustainable livelihoods (often tending livestock).

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors demonstrate the importance of information asymmetries in transnational households, where physical distance between family members can make information barriers especially acute, and implement an experiment among migrants in Washington, DC, and their families in El Salvador that examines how information asymmetry can have strategic and inadvertent impacts on remittance decisions.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that donors try to resolve this dilemma by delivering aid through non-state actors, and they provide evidence that bypassing governments via NGOs and multilateral organizations is indeed a response to weak recipient state institutions.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the flypaper effects of whether women retain control over these transfers once within the household and how reallocation of the transfers affects women's empowerment.

TL;DR: In this article, the impact of female property rights on male and female suicide rates in India was studied using individual level data on domestic violence and they found evidence that increased property rights for women did increase the incidence of wife beating in India.

TL;DR: Evidence consistent with quality of formal care acting as a constraint on improvements in newborn health is found, despite the rather large shift from the informal to the formal sector in Malawi.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors evaluated the impacts of a BDS program serving female microentrepreneurs in Peru using an experimental design, that included two treatment groups: one received only general training (GT), albeit more time-intense than previous studies, and delivered by experts, while the other received in addition technical assistance (TA).

TL;DR: This article showed that when institutions are weak, oil increases the incentive to opt for professions with better access to rents (law, business, and the social sciences), rather than careers in engineering, creating a deviation from the optimal allocation between the two types of specialization.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors employ a dynamic, stochastic, heterogeneous agent model where farm households have access to contingent credit and make savings, technology and loan repayment choices.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors developed a general equilibrium model to assess the quantitative impact of distorting institutions and policies related to the poor business environment in 30 sub-Saharan African countries.

TL;DR: This article used an annual panel of African temperatures and port-level slave exports to show that exports declined when local temperatures were warmer than normal, and they support their interpretation using the histories of Whydah, Benguela and Mozambique.