The production of ethanol and sugar from sugar cane has sharply increased for the last 20 years. If there are overall incentives to substitute the consumption of fossil fuels by biofuels, the increase of production and the expansion of new cultivated areas of sugar cane have eventually an impact...

Independent and high-quality evaluations of government policies are an important input for designing evidence-based policy. Lack of incentives and institutions to write such evaluations, on the other hand, carry the risk of turning the system into a costly beauty contest. We study one of the...

We study the long-run implications of regional and ethnic favoritism in Africa. Combining geocoded individual-level survey data from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) with data on national leaders’ birthplaces across 41 African countries, we explore the educational attainment of adults...

We study the economic implications of regional favoritism, a form of distributive politics that redistributes resources spatially within countries. We use a large sample of enterprise surveys spanning across many low and middle income countries, and utilize transitions of national political...

In this paper, we study the extent to which ministers engage in regional favoritism. We are the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of a larger set of the governing elite, not just focusing on the primary leader. We hand-collect birthplaces of this governing elite globally. Combining this...

Currently, the region named Brazilian Legal Amazon (BLA) represents the agricultural frontier of Brazil, and it concentrates the deforestation processes, so-called arc of deforestation. This region covers the total area of Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima, and Tocantins, and...

The "true" size of fiscal multipliers is widely debated by economists and policy makers as large (small) multipliers provide arguments to expand (cut) public spending. Within a meta-analytical framework, we ask whether the large observed variance in multiplier estimates can be explained by the...