We construct a matrix showing the share of the year 2000 population in every country that is descended from people in different source countries in the year 1500. Using the matrix to adjust indicators of early development so they reflect the history of a population's ancestors rather than the history of the place they live today greatly improves the ability of those indicators to predict current GDP. The variance of early development history of a country's inhabitants is a good predictor for current inequality, with ethnic groups originating in regions having longer histories of organized states tending to be at the upper end of a country's income distribution.

This paper exploits a new source of variation in Head Start funding to identify the program's effects on health and schooling. In 1965 the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) provided technical assistance to the 300 poorest counties to develop Head Start proposals. The result was a large and lasting discontinuity in Head Start funding rates at the OEO cutoff for grant-writing assistance. We find evidence of a large drop at the OEO cutoff in mortality rates for children from causes that could be affected by Head Start, as well as suggestive evidence for a positive effect on educational attainment.

Transactions take place in the rm rather than in the market because the rm o ers agents who make speci c investments power. Past literature emphasizes the allocation of ownership as the primary mechanism by which the rm does this. Within the contractibility assumptions of this literature, we identify a potentially superior mechanism, the regulation of access to critical resources. Access can be better than ownership because: i) the power agents get from access is more contingent on them making the right investment; ii) ownership has adverse e ects on the incentive to specialize. The theory explains the importance of internal organization and third party ownership. A preliminary version of this paper circulated with the title \\Implicit Property Rights in a Theory of the

We study how public and private disclosure requirements interact to influence both tax regulator enforcement and firm disclosure. To capture IRS enforcement activities, we introduce a novel data set of IRS acquisition of firms’ public financial disclosures, which we label IRS attention. We examine the implementation of two new disclosure requirements that potentially alter IRS attention: FIN 48, which increased public tax disclosure requirements, and Schedule UTP, which increased private tax disclosure. We find that IRS attention increased following FIN 48 but subsequently decreased following Schedule UTP, consistent with public and private disclosure interacting to influence tax enforcement. We next examine how private tax disclosure requirements under Schedule UTP affected firms’ public disclosure responses. We find that, following Schedule UTP, firms significantly increased the quantity and altered the content of their tax-related disclosures, consistent with lower tax-related proprietary costs of disclosure. Our results suggest that changes in SEC disclosure requirements altered the IRS's behavior with regard to public information acquisition, and, relatedly, changes in IRS private disclosure requirements appear to change firms’ public disclosure behavior.

We compare initial offer prices in privatizations to initial prices in public offerings of private companies. The evidence indicates that government officials in the United Kingdom underprice IPOs significantly more than their private company counterparts. In Canada and Malaysia, however, the opposite is true. There does not appear to be a general tendency for privatizations to be underpriced to a greater degree than private company IPOs. We provide additional evidence on the determinants of privatization initial returns. Our findings indicate that initial returns are significantly higher in relatively primitive capital markets and for privatized companies in regulated industries.

This paper presents an information‐theoretic, infinite horizon model of the equity issue decision. The model predicts that (a) equity issues on average are preceded by an abnormal positive return on the stock, although for some firms the issue is preceded by a loss; (b) equity issues on average are preceded by an abnormal rise in the market; and (c) the stock price drops at the announcement of an issue. The model provides a measure of the welfare cost of asymmetric information; the welfare loss may be small even if the price drop at issue announcement is large.

20, 3 leaves : ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Cover title.;"January, 1978."

In Italian: Lo Spazio nei Piani Economici, Franco Angeli Editore, Milan, 1972, 391 p. In Spanish: El Factor Espacio en la Planificación del Desarollo, Series ‘Fondo de Cultura Económica’, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1980, 405 p.

This paper evaluates an experiment in which individuals in rural Malawi were randomly assigned monetary incentives to learn their HIV results after being tested. Distance to the HIV results centers was also randomly assigned. Without any incentive, 34 percent of the participants learned their HIV results. However, even the smallest incentive doubled that share. Using the randomly assigned incentives and distance from results centers as instruments for the knowledge of HIV status, sexually active HIV-positive individuals who learned their results are three times more likely to purchase condoms two months later than sexually active HIV-positive individuals who did not learn their results; however, HIV-positive individuals who learned their results purchase only two additional condoms than those who did not. There is no significant effect of learning HIV-negative status on the purchase of condoms.