Browsing HKS Faculty Scholarship by Keyword "DEV - International Development"
Now showing items 1-20 of 58
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AGOA Rules: The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Special Fabric Provisions
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)Lesotho and other least developed African countries responded impressively to the preferences they were granted under the African Growth and Opportunities Act with a rapid increase in their clothing exports to the US. But ... -
Are Bilateral Remittances Countercyclical?
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)By putting together a relatively large data set on bilateral remittances of emigrants, this paper is able to shed light on the important hypothesis of smoothing. The smoothing hypothesis is that remittances are countercyclical ... -
Bank Credit And Business Networks
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)We construct the topology of business networks across the population of firms in an emerging economy, Pakistan, and estimate the value that membership in large yet diffuse networks brings in terms of access to bank credit ... -
Building Social Capital Through Microfinance
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)A number of development assistance programs promote community interaction as a means of building social capital. Yet, despite strong theoretical underpinnings, the role of repeat interactions in sustaining cooperation has ... -
Can Leading Indicators Assess Country Vulnerability? Evidence from the 2008-09 Global Financial Crisis
(Elsevier, 2012)This paper investigates whether leading indicators can help explain the cross-country incidence of the 2008-09 financial crisis. Rather than looking for indicators with specific relevance to the current crisis, the selection ... -
Can Leading Indicators Assess Country Vulnerability? Evidence from the 2008-09 Global Financial Crisis
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)This paper investigates whether leading indicators can help explain the cross-country incidence of the 2008-09 financial crisis. Rather than looking for indicators with specific relevance to the current crisis, the selection ... -
Closing the Gender Gap in Education: Does it Foretell the Closing of the Employment, Marriage, and Motherhood Gaps?
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)In this paper we examine several dimensions of gender disparity for a sample of 40 countries using micro-level data. We start by documenting the reversal of the gender education gap and ranking countries by the year in ... -
A Comparison of Product Price Targeting and Other Monetary Anchor Options, for Commodity Exporters in Latin America
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)Seven possible nominal variables are considered as candidates to be the anchor or target for monetary policy. The context is countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), which tend to be price takers on world markets, ... -
Constructing, Deconstructing, and Reconstructing Career Civil Service Systems in Latin America
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)Patronage—the discretionary allocation of public sector jobs—continues to be a dominant way government is staffed in most Latin American countries and it is proving resistant to the imprecations of public sector reformers. ... -
Country Diversification, Product Ubiquity, and Economic Divergence
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)Countries differ markedly in the diversification of their exports. Products differ in the number of countries that export them, which we define as their ubiquity. We document a new stylized fact in the global pattern of ... -
Deals Versus Rules: Policy Implementation Uncertainty and Why Firms Hate It
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)Firms in Africa report "regulatory and economic policy uncertainty" as a top constraint to their growth. We argue that often firms in Africa do not cope with policy rules, rather they face deals; firm-specific policy actions ... -
Determinants of Agricultural and Mineral Commodity Prices
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)Prices of most agricultural and mineral commodities rose strongly in the past decade, peaking sharply in 2008. Popular explanations included strong global growth (especially from China and India), easy monetary policy (as ... -
Development as Leadership-led Change
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2010)Development involves change, but many development initiatives produce unimpressive results. The authors ask why and consider how to close the gap between the intended change and what we actually see in the evidence. This ... -
Diagnostics Before Prescription
(American Economic Association, 2010)Development economists should stop acting as categorical advocates (or detractors) for specific approaches to development. They should instead be diagnosticians, helping decisionmakers choose the right model (and remedy) ... -
Do Rising Top Incomes Lift All Boats?
(2009)Pooling data for 1905 to 2000, we find no systematic relationship between top income shares and economic growth in a panel of 12 developed nations observed for between 22 and 85 years. After 1960, however, a one percentage ... -
Environmental Effects of International Trade
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2009)The report surveys the state of our knowledge regarding the effects of trade on the environment. A central question is whether globalization helps or hurts in achieving the best tradeoff between environmental and economic ... -
Evaluation of Jamaica's PATH Conditional Cash Transfer Programme
(Routledge, 2010)This paper summarizes the findings of an evaluation of the Programme of Advancement through Health and Education (PATH), a conditional cash transfer programme implemented by the Government of Jamaica. We find that PATH was ... -
Female Employment and Fertility in Rural China
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)Data on 2,288 married women from the 2006 China Health and Nutrition Survey are deployed to study how off-farm female employment affects fertility. Such employment reduces a married woman’s actual number of children by ... -
The Forward Market in Emerging Currencies: Less Biased than in Major Currencies
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2009)Many studies have replicated the finding that the forward rate is a biased predictor of the future change in the spot exchange rate. Usually the forward discount actually points in the wrong direction. But, at least until ... -
Funding Economic Development: A Comparative Study of Financial Sector Reform in Vietnam and China
(United Nations Development Programme and Fulbright Economics Teaching Program, 2009)Although there is considerable debate among economists as to the impact of financial sector development on economic growth, empirical evidence indicates a strong, direct link between the two. A recent comprehensive review ...