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This paper presents empirical evidence that the growth of export manufacturing in Mexico during a period of major trade reforms {the years 1986 to 2000) altered the distribution of education. I use variation in the timing of factory openings across commuting zones to show that school drop-out increased with local expansions in export-manufacturing industries. The magnitudes I find suggest that for every 25 jobs created, one student dropped out of school at grade 9 rather than continuing through to grade 12. These effects are driven by less-skilled export-manufacturing jobs which raised the opportunity cost of schooling for students at the margin.

Anthropologists have documented substantial and persistent differences in food preferences across social groups. My paper asks whether such food cultures can constrain caloric intake? I first document that interstate migrants within India consume fewer calories per rupee of food expenditure compared to their neighbors. Second, I show that migrants bring their origin-state food preferences with them. Third, I link these findings by showing that the gap in caloric intake between locals and migrants depends on the suitability and intensity of the migrants' origin-state preferences. The most affected migrants would consume seven percent more calories if they possessed their neighbors' preferences.

We conduct a randomized experiment that generates exogenous variation in the access to foreign markets for rug producers in Egypt. Combined with detailed survey data, we causally identify the impact of exporting on firm performance. Treatment firms report 16–26% higher profits and exhibit large improvements in quality alongside reductions in output per hour relative to control firms. These findings do not simply reflect firms being offered higher margins to manufacture high-quality products that take longer to produce. Instead, we find evidence of learning-by-exporting whereby exporting improves technical efficiency. First, treatment firms have higher productivity and quality after controlling for rug specifications. Second, when asked to produce an identical domestic rug using the same inputs and same capital equipment, treatment firms produce higher quality rugs despite no difference in production time. Third, treatment firms exhibit learning curves over time. Finally, we document knowledge transfers with quality increasing most along the specific dimensions that the knowledge pertained to.

This article studies technology adoption in a cluster of soccer-ball producers in Sialkot, Pakistan. We invented a new cutting technology that reduces waste of the primary raw material and gave the technology to a random subset of producers. Despite the clear net benefits for nearly all firms, after 15 months take-up remained puzzlingly low. We hypothesize that an important reason for the lack of adoption is a misalignment of incentives within firms: the key employees (cutters and printers) are typically paid piece rates, with no incentive to reduce waste, and the new technology slows them down, at least initially. Fearing reductions in their effective wage, employees resist adoption in various ways, including by misinforming owners about the value of the technology. To investigate this hypothesis, we implemented a second experiment among the firms that originally received the technology: we offered one cutter and one printer per firm a lump-sum payment, approximately a month’s earnings, conditional on demonstrating competence in using the technology in the presence of the owner. This incentive payment, small from the point of view of the firm, had a significant positive effect on adoption. The results suggest that misalignment of incentives within firms is an important barrier to technology adoption in our setting.

This paper explores the causes and consequences of regional taste differences. I introduce habit formation into a standard general equilibrium model Household tastes evolve over time to favor foods consumed as a child. Thus, locally abundant foods are preferred in every region, as they were relatively inexpensive in prior generations. These patterns alter the correspondence between price changes and nutrition. For example, neglecting this relationship between tastes and agro-climatic endowments overstates the short-run nutritional gains from agricultural trade liberalization, since preferred foods rise in price in every region. I examine the models predictions using household survey data from many regions of India.

This study assesses whether the mainstreaming hypothesis, derived from cultivation frameworks developed during the mass audience era, remains operative in a digital media environment characterized by fragmenting media and cultural taste publics. In particular, we consider evolving conceptions of mainstreaming that stimulated our research questions and hypotheses in four surveys conducted from 2015 to 2024. We broaden our view of media to see if entertainment content—especially film genres—can provide common ground in attracting people with little else in common. Results suggest that such “cultural mainstreaming” may occur by providing common gratifications and impact global indictors of our lives—happiness, community attachment, feelings about our quality of life, and perceived cosmopoliteness. But the results are limited to a general adult population, not the younger students studied. The findings apply only to the general adult population and not to the younger student sample examined. Overall, the results indicate that the cultivation effect is relatively weak; the small number of significant relationships observed does not appear to exceed what might be expected by chance. Taken together, these findings suggest that mainstreaming and media influence operate as more complex processes in the digital era.

Trade liberalization changes the volatility of returns by reducing the negative correlation between local prices and productivity shocks. In this paper, we explore these second-moment effects of trade. Using forty years of agricultural micro-data from India, we show that falling trade costs due to expansions of the Indian highway network reduced the responsiveness of local prices to local yields but increased the responsiveness of local prices to yields elsewhere. In response, farmers shifted their production toward crops with less volatile yields, especially so for those with poor access to risk mitigating technologies such as banks. We then characterize how volatility affects farmers’ crop allocation using a portfolio choice framework where returns are determined in general equilibrium by a many-location, many-good Ricardian trade model with flexible trade costs. Finally, we structurally estimate the model—recovering farmers’ risk-return preferences from the gradient of the mean-variance frontier at their observed crop choices—to quantify the second-moment effects of trade. The simultaneous expansion of both the highway and rural bank networks increased the mean and the variance of farmer real income, with the first-moment effect dominating such that expected welfare rose 4.4%. But had rural bank access remained unchanged, welfare gains would have been only half as great, as risk mitigating technologies allowed farmers to take advantage of higher-risk higher-return allocations.

This commentary reviews the literature exploring the impact of international trade on the cost of living. We first summarize the strategies researchers have used to identify such impacts in the data before discussing the evidence for heterogeneity in price effects across income groups and across regions. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of how trade may have affected components of the price index such as differentiated manufactures and services where measurement is more challenging and where the existing literature has made less progress.

The arrival of global retail chains in developing countries is causing a radical transformation in the way households source their consumption. This paper draws on a rich collection of Mexican microdata to estimate the effect of foreign supermarket entry on household welfare and decomposes this effect into six channels. We find that foreign entry causes large welfare gains for the average household predominantly driven by a reduction in the cost of living—both through price reductions at domestic stores and through the direct consumer gains from foreign stores. These gains are, on average, positive for all income groups but are regressive.

A counter-intuitive result from consumer theory is that consumers facing stable prices will benefit from a mean-preserving spread of those prices. This article explores a new explanation for why the common intuition that price volatility is undesirable may be correct: the presence of habit formation in consumption. If prices are fluctuating, and preferences depend on past consumption, in every period the most favored goods can also be the most expensive ones, with negative consequences for both welfare and nutrition.