Showing papers in "Journal of Development Economics in 2017"

TL;DR: In this article, strong but differentiated links between climate and urbanization in large panels of districts and cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, which has dried substantially in the past fifty years.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors differentiate the two potential explanations by estimating a patent production function and by relating a firm's patents in force to its labor productivity, concluding that non-innovation related motives for acquiring patents may have played an important role in the patenting surge.

TL;DR: In this article, the role of agronomic inputs in cereal yield improvements and the consequences for countries' processes of structural change is estimated. And the results suggest that a half ton increase in staple yields generates a 14 to 19 percent higher GDP per capita and a 4.6 to 5.6 percentage point lower labor share in agriculture.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors run a field experiment to measure the impact of augmenting the lab-to-farm model with a direct CF training on the diffusion of a new technology.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors study ethnic favoritism in a global sample and rely on nighttime light intensity to capture a broad range of preferential policies targeted towards the political leaders' ethnic homelands.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors use nationally representative household data from India to establish the intergenerational effect of early marriage on a broad set of health and educational investments and outcomes, and to explicate the underlying mechanisms.

TL;DR: In this article, two decomposition methods are proposed to disentangle the main drivers of the upward segment of the mobility transition curve to OECD destination countries, which shed light on the role of both microeconomic drivers (i.e., financial incentives and constraints) and macroeconomic drivers, as well as the skill composition of the population.

TL;DR: This paper explored the implications of home ownership as a status good for housing prices and found that the evidence is consistent with the status competition hypothesis, and explored regional variations in the sex ratio for the pre-marital age cohort across China (as a proxy for differential strength for concerns for status).

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore how a large earthquake in Indonesia affected labor market outcomes, in particular the evolution of wages across sectors, and find that the earthquake had a positive effect on wage growth for workers who were employed in the agricultural sector at baseline.

TL;DR: In this article, the causal impacts of a cash transfer program (HSNP) and an index-based insurance product (IBLI), which were implemented contemporaneously among the same population, were compared.

TL;DR: This article examined the relationship between entry regulation and the business interests of former President Ben Ali's family using firm-level data from Tunisia and found that profit and market share premia from being connected increase along the firm-size distribution, especially in highly regulated sectors.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors evaluate this policy claim for Peru, a developing country whose regions were exposed to an asymmetric infrastructure shock in so doing, taking advantage of detailed geo-referenced data on firm-level trade for the period 2003-2010 as well as on recent and historical road infrastructure.

TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of tariff changes due to free-trade agreements on plants' fuel use, plants' abatement expenditures, and measures of air pollution around plants' location is assessed.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the long term effects and subsequent intergenerational transmission of exposure in childhood to the natural disasters that have occurred in Latin America in the last 100 years and found that children in utero and young children are the most vulnerable to natural disasters and suffer the most long-lasting negative effects.

TL;DR: For example, the authors found that young adults exposed to increased local violence attained significantly less years of education, were less likely to complete compulsory schooling, and were more likely to be employed.

TL;DR: In this article, a field experiment with a change in voting laws reducing the fine for abstention to assess the effects of monetary incentives to encourage voter participation was conducted, and it was shown that the reduction in abstention is driven by voters who are in the center of the political spectrum, hold less political information and have lower subjective value of voting.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide the first quantitative assessment of the effect that using subsidies with ESR has on exports, the intensity of competition and welfare, both in the enacting country and its trading partners, using a two-country model of trade with heterogeneous firms.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the effect of experience and knowledge on weather insurance adoption and found that providing information about the payout probability has a strong positive effect on insurance take-up.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined whether after-school care for children aged between 6 and 13 has an impact on labor market outcomes for women in Chile and found that program participation increases employment by 5% and labor force participation by 7%, while the intervention also generates substantial childcare substitution.

TL;DR: This article examined the long-term impact of civil conflict on domestic violence and intra-household bargaining using data from Rwanda and found that women who married after the 1994 genocide experienced significantly increased domestic violence, and reduced decision-making power relative to women who had married before, with a greater effect for women in localities with high genocide intensity.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used a biometric technology to monitor the attendance of public health workers in India, which resulted in a 15 percent increase in staff presence, particularly for lower-level staff.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explored the relationship between religion and politics from a theoretical standpoint, assuming that religious clerics can be co-opted by the ruler acting as an autocrat, and analyzed the optimal level of cooperation between the autocrat and the religious clerics, which itself impinges upon political stability.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluated the performance of the Malawi Social Action Fund, an at-scale, government-operated program, across and within-village randomization is used to estimate effects on food security and use of fertilizer.

TL;DR: This paper used geo-coded data on African conflicts to uncover a discontinuous increase in conflict after 1807 in areas affected by the slave trade, indicating that suppression increased the incidence of conflict between Africans.

TL;DR: In this article, a model where a long-term planning horizon improves economic decisions but also increases the salience of anticipated future utility is presented, where a gloomy future induces the agent to shorten her time horizon in order to reduce distress caused by the anticipation of poverty, at the cost of worsening her realized future consumption.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the impact of female leadership on sex selection in rural India and found an increase in the survival of higher birth order girls if political seats at the local level have been reserved for women.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors implemented an artefactual field experiment in Malawi to test the ability of households to manage a cash windfall and found that neither savings defaults nor payment delays affect the amount or composition of spending, suggesting that households manage cash effectively without the use of formal financial products.

TL;DR: In this article, an innovative social marketing campaign targeting pro-sanitation messages to households active in local marriage markets was implemented with the goal of increasing toilet ownership in Haryana state in India.

TL;DR: In this paper, the impact of one of the world's largest anti-poverty programs, India's NREGS, on the intensity of Maoist conflict was analyzed using a regression-discontinuity design.

TL;DR: This paper studied the impact of cultural differences on trade over time during and after the Cold War and provided evidence consistent with the hypothesis that cold-war blocs have trumped cultural differences during the cold war.