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Data: Urban Transportation, Land Use, and Growth: Evidence from China 1995-2010
This paper investigates how the extent and configuration of Chinese road and railroad networks has shaped the spatial transformation and degree of compactness of Chinese urban regions in the last 20 years, a period in which center cities were experiencing strong population inflows but relative losses of industry to the urban periphery. We find strong evidence that the...
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Data: Clientelism and State Capacity: Persistence and Change in Sierra Leone and Colombia
We use the colonial organization of chieftaincy in Sierra Leone to study the e↵ect of constraints on chiefs’ power on economic outcomes, citizens’ attitudes and social capital. A paramount chief must come from one of the ruling families originally recognized by British colonial authorities. Chiefs face fewer constraints and less political competition in chiefdoms with...
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Data: Evaluation of the impact of microfinance in rural areas of Morocco
Microcredit has rapidly expanded in the past years, providing access to financial services to a large population previously excluded from the financial system. However, whether it helps the poor has been a subject of intense debate on which, until very recently, there was no rigorous evidence. This paper reports the results of a randomized experiment designed to measure the...
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Blog post
IGC Quick Clicks: Where are all the female economists?
“In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders,” once said Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. Hopefully, yes. But today, this is not true in most fields and definitely not in economics. Why is this and how can we change it? Over the last few years, we have witnessed an uproar in many parts of the world. Women have...
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Data: Long Run-Effects of Repayment Flexibility in Microfinance: Evidence from India
Financiers across the world structure debt contracts to limit the risk of entrepreneurial lending. But debt structures that reduce risk may inhibit enterprise growth, especially among the poor. Using a field experiment we quantify the short- and long-run tradeo↵s associated with the classic microfinance debt contract. We contrast the classic contract which requires that...
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Data: Encouraging Seasonal Migration to Mitigate the Consequences of a Seasonal Famine in Rural Bangladesh
Hunger during pre-harvest lean seasons is widespread in the agrarian areas of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. We randomly assign an $8.50 incentive to households in rural Bangladesh to out-migrate during the lean season. The incentive induces 22% of households to send a seasonal migrant, their consumption at the origin increases significantly, and treated households are 8-10...
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Data: Spatial Development and Local Technology
We present a theory of spatial development. Manufacturing and services frms located in a continuous geographic area choose each period how much to innovate. Firms trade subject to transport costs and technology diffuses spatially. We apply the model to study the evolution of the US economy in the last half-century and fnd that it can generate the reduction in the...
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Data: The Agricultural Productivity Gap in Developing Countries
According to national accounts data for developing countries, value added per worker is on average four times higher in the non-agriculture sector than in agriculture. Taken at face value this “agricultural productivity gap” suggests that labor is greatly misallocated across sectors in the developing world. In this paper we draw on new micro evidence to ask to what...
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Data: Understanding fiscal capacity in developing economies: Firms as third-party tax enforcers
This paper presents a simple agency model to explain why third-party income reporting by employers dramatically improves income tax enforcement. Modern firms have a large number of employees and carry out complex production tasks, which requires the use of accurate business records. Because such records are widely used within the firm, any single employee can denounce...
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Data: The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt Overhang
We propose a tractable variant of the open economy neoclassical growth model that emphasizes political economy and contracting frictions. The political economy frictions involve a preference for immediate spending, while the contracting friction is a lack of commitment regarding foreign debt and expropriation. We show that the political economy frictions slow an economy’s...