Does poverty lead to crime? We shed light on this question using two independent and exogenous shocks to household income in rural India: the dramatic reduction in import tariffs in the early 1990s and rainfall variations. We find that trade shocks, previously shown to raise relative poverty,...

This paper investigates whether the event of a woman winning office in a competitive election encourages women's future participation in politics, using constituency level data for elections to India's state assemblies and a regression discontinuity design. On average, we find that female...

This paper compares economic outcomes across areas in India which were under direct British colonial rule with areas which were under indirect colonial rule. Controlling for selective annexation using a specific policy rule, I find that areas which experienced direct rule have significantly...

This paper documents the short-term and long-term trends in internal conflict in South Asian countries, using multiple data sources. I find that incidents of terrorism have been rising across South Asia over the past decade, and this increase has been concentrated in economically lagging regions...

We examine three reforms to property rights introduced by the United States in the Philippines in the early 20th century: the redistribution of large estates to their tenants, the creation of a system of secure land titles, and a homestead program to encourage cultivation of public lands. During...

This paper studies the policy determinants of economic transition and estimates the demand for labor in the infant private sector in urban China. We show that a reform that untied access to housing in urban areas from working for the state sector accounts for more than a quarter of the overall...

We survey the recent literature on the mental health effects of conflict. We highlight the methodological challenges faced in this literature, which include the lack of validated mental health scales in a survey context, the difficulties in measuring individual exposure to conflict, and the...

We develop a new survey instrument to codify CEOs' diaries in large samples and use it to measure the labor supply of 1,114 family and professional CEOs of manufacturing firms across six countries (Brazil, France, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the United States). By this measure, family...

Over the past years, forward-looking CEOs have adopted a higher-ambition approach to strategy and leadership. These "higher-ambition CEOs" are driven by a sense of purpose that goes beyond achieving financial success. They aspire to build organizations that succeed in the marketplace by earning...

Complex, multiparty negotiations are often analyzed as principals negotiating through agents, as two-level games (Putnam 1988), or in coalitional terms. The relatively new concept of a "multi-front negotiation campaign" (Sebenius 2010, Lax and Sebenius, 2012) offers an analytic approach that may...