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Publications (49)
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– Landholding patterns and women’s low work participation rates in West Bengal, India
Compared with most other Indian states, women’s reported work participation rates have historically been low in West Bengal. This trend is more prominent in rural areas. Historians have tried to explain this phenomenon in terms of culture and the ideology of domesticity.While persisting cultural...
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– A comparison across different selection models
This study focuses on estimating the returns to education in non-farm self-employed businesses in the Indian context, using nationwide individual- and household-level data provided by the India Human Development Survey for the year 2011/12. Given that different studies have used different types of...
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– A regression discontinuity approach
This paper estimates returns to schooling in Thailand, applying a regression discontinuity approach to the change in the compulsory schooling law in 1978. This law helped to enhance human capital investment on the eve of rapid structural transformation. The returns to schooling based on our...
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– Evidence from Sierra Leone
Using data from Sierra Leone, I explore the role of cognitive ability in sorting across sectors and the importance of perceptions in the employment decision-making process. Crucial to the analysis is the introduction of the aid-industry/development sector as a ‘third sector’, which is shown to be...
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– When manufacturing is jobless and services are tradable
Globalization and robotics (globotics) are transforming the world economy at an explosive pace since they are driven by digital technology that is advancing in phenomenal increments. This paper—which should be considered a ‘thought piece’—argues that the globotics transformation is likely to disable...
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– The role of infrastructure development and gender norms
Traditional gender norms can restrict independent migration by women, preventing them from taking advantage of economic opportunities in urban non-agricultural industries. However, women may be able to circumvent such restrictions by using marriage to engage in long-distance migration—if they are...
– Theory, Policies, and Performance
Following on WIDER's work on Development Finance which has involved three projects since 2002, a development conference on 'Aid: Principles, Policies and Performance' was organized in June 2006. Aid is one of the most challenging development issues facing the international community. There is now a...
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– Policy Lessons from Recent Experience
This paper investigates the macroeconomic challenges created by a surge in aid inflows. It develops an analytical framework for examining possible policy responses to increased aid, in terms of absorption and spending of aid—where the central bank controls absorption through monetary policy and the...
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– When Aid Volatility Matters and When It Does Not
In previous papers we have argued that aid is likely to mitigate the negative effects of external shocks on economic growth (i.e., aid is more effective in countries that are more vulnerable to external shocks). Recently an important debate has emerged about the possible negative effects of aid...
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We examine the properties of alternative monetary policy rules in response to large aid surges in low-income countries characterized by incomplete capital market integration and currency substitution. Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, we show that simple monetary rules that...
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– Looking at the Aid-Social Capital-Growth Nexus
We examine the impact of institutional quality and social capital on aid effectiveness. We find strong evidence that social capital and institutions enhance aid effectiveness. Moreover, once we account for the role of social capital and institutions, the impact of policies tend to disappear. These...
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This paper analyses three issues in strategic donor-recipient interaction motivated by the complexity of the rationale underlying aid. The first is when we have several principals with conflicting objectives. Any one principal cannot offer high powered incentives to the agent to carry out their...
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This paper investigates the role of aid in mitigating the adverse effects of commodity export price shocks on growth in commodity-dependent countries. Using a large cross-country dataset, we find that negative shocks matter for short-term growth, while the ex ante risk of shocks does not seem to...
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– An Intertemporal Analysis
This paper examines the welfare implications of foreign aid within the framework of a two-period, two-country model of international trade. It is up to the donor country to decide what fraction of any given aid package is to be made available for the recipient’s immediate, period-one consumption...
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– Incentives for a Pro-Poor Policy
We develop a theoretical model of foreign aid to analyse a method of disbursement of aid which induces the recipient government to follow a more pro-poor policy than it otherwise would do. In our two-period model, aid is given in the second period and the volume of it depends on the level of...
The present paper serves as an introduction to this special issue providing a justification for, and linking and introducing to the articles that follow. A central message emanating from the papers included in this special issue is that it is not sufficient to double aid efforts by simply raising...
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