We estimate the impacts of large-scale unconditional cash transfers on child survival. One-time transfers of USD 1000 were provided to over 10,500 poor households across 653 randomized villages in ...

Information frictions—where a worker and her current employer know more about the worker’s productivity than prospective employers—have complex equity-efficiency implications in the teacher labor ...

This paper revisits the Great Gatsby curve that connects inequality to mobility, using panel data spanning several countries and time periods. Existing literature observes that the intergenerational ...

This paper develops a unified model of the cognitive division of labour in a knowledge economy. Building on recent frameworks for knowledge creation and decision making under uncertainty, it ...

In Davis and Gertler (2015), we used household-level microdata from Mexico to predict future air conditioning adoption as a function of income and temperature. Revisiting these predictions with 12 ...

Two-sided platforms (2SPs) cater to two or more distinct groups of customers, facilitating value-creating interactions between them. The village market and the village matchmaker were 2SPs; eBay and ...

This paper discusses the role of annuities in retirement planning. It begins by explaining the basic theory underlying the individual welfare gains available from annuitizing resources in retirement.

Using a large and representative panel of U.S. brokerage accounts, we show that retail investors trade as contrarians after large earnings surprises, especially for loser stocks, and that such ...

Empirical research on cities starts with a spatial equilibrium condition: workers and firms are assumed to be indifferent across space. This condition implies that research on cities is different from ...

This paper tests the long-standing hypothesis that China's 1958 Four Pests Campaign, which exterminated sparrows despite scientists’ warnings about their pest-control role, exacerbated the Great ...

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, ...

In 1997-98, five east Asian countries -- Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand -- experienced sharp currency and banking crises. The contraction of real GDP was severe in ...