The impact of early-life shocks on adult welfare in Brazil: Questions of measurement and timing.

Recent literature provides evidence that income shocks early in life can have long-run consequences on adult welfare. Rural Brazil frequently suffers from rainfall variations that negatively impact vulnerable households, who often lack the means for coping with these events. This paper evaluates how early-life rainfall shocks influence adult health and socioeconomic outcomes in Brazil.

Receptiveness to advice, cognitive ability, and technology adoption.

We construct a model of technology adoption with agents differing on two dimensions: their cognitive ability and their receptiveness to advice. While cognitive ability unambiguously speeds adoption, receptiveness to advice may speed adoption for individuals with low cognitive ability, but slow adoption for individuals with high cognitive ability. We conduct economic experiments measuring US farmers' cognitive ability and receptiveness to advice and examine how these characteristics impact their speed of adoption of genetically modified (GM) corn seeds.