With serious impacts of climate change looming in a few decades, but current poverty still high in the developing world, we ask how to spend development aid earmarked for the poor. Poverty reduction tends to be strongly linked to economic growth, but growth impacts the environment and increases...

When the Tanzanian government formalized over 200,000 informal land claims by granting leasehold titles to residents of unplanned settlements in Dar es Salaam in 2004, a few neighborhoods in the initial plan were excluded due to missing satellite photos. We examine the impact of this low-cost,...

Little is known about the extent and forces of urban path dependence in developing countries. Railroad construction in colonial Kenya provides a natural experiment to study the emergence and persistence of this spatial equilibrium. Using new data at a fine spatial level over one century shows...

With around 50% of the urban men between age 15 and 30 unemployed, Ethiopia has one of the highest unemployment rates worldwide. This paper describes the nature of unemployment among young men in urban Ethiopia. We analyse the determinants of incidence and duration and find that most variables...

We use survey data to investigate how urban households in Ethiopia coped with the food price shock in 2008 and idiosyncratic shocks. Qualitative data indicate that the high food price inflation was by far the most adverse economic shock between 2004 and 2008, and that a significant proportion of...

We report on a randomized field experiment using price incentives to address both economic and gender inequality in land tenure formalization. During the 1990s and 2000s, nearly two dozen African countries proposed de jure land reforms extending access to formal, freehold land tenure to millions...

We study the impact of growth and growth accelerations on poverty and inequality in Indonesia using a new panel dataset covering 26 provinces over the period 1977-2010. This new dataset allows us to distinguish between mining and non-mining sectors of the economy. We find that growth in...

Surprisingly little is known about the impact resource booms on income inequality in resource rich countries (Ross, 2007). This paper develops a simple theory, in the context of a two sector growth model in which learning-by-doing drives growth, to explain the time path of inequality following a...

This paper investigates the role of aid in mitigating the adverse effects of commodity export price shocks on growth in commodity-dependent countries. Using a large cross-country dataset, we find that negative shocks matter for short-term growth, while the ex ante risk of shocks does not seem to...

While political instability is broadly believed to be bad for economic growth., firm performance and foreign direct investment, few studies convincingly identify the causal impact of conflict on firms and export performance. In this paper, we analyze the impact of the Kenyan post-election...