How will worldwide changes in population affect pressures for international migration in the future? We contrast the past three decades, during which population pressures contributed to substantial labor flows from neighboring countries into the United States and Europe, with the coming three...

We examine "agglomeration shadows" that emerge around large cities, which discourage some economic activities in nearby areas. Identifying agglomeration shadows is complicated, however, by endogenous city formation and "wave interference" that we show in simulations. We use the locations of...

Bureaucracies may set priorities for their workload according to social goals or the desires of concentrated private interests. This paper explores bureaucratic priorities empirically by studying Superfund, the federal program for cleaning up contaminated sites. It examines the amount of time...

Many communities are concerned about the reuse of potentially contaminated land ("brownfields") and believe that environmental liability is a hindrance to redevelopment. However, with land price adjustments, liability might not impede the reuse of this land. Existing literature has found price...

There is controversy about whether geography matters mainly because of its contemporaneous impact on economic outcomes or because of its interaction with historical events. Looking at terrain ruggedness, we are able to estimate the importance of these two channels. Because rugged terrain hinders...

Recent work has supported that there is a connection between the level of domestic debt level and sovereign default on external debt. We examine the potential linkages in a case study of Venezuela from 1984 to 2013. This unique example encompasses multiple financial crises, cycles of...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Brownfields Program awards grants to redevelop contaminated lands known as brownfields. This paper estimates cleanup benefits by combining administrative records for a nationally representative sample of brownfields with high-resolution, high-frequency...

Place-based policies commonly target underperforming areas, such as deteriorating downtown business districts and disadvantaged regions. Principal examples include enterprise zones, European Union Structural Funds, and industrial cluster policies. Place-based policies are rationalized by various...

U.S. farms, and with them agricultural lending institutions, are currently experiencing their most severe stress since the 1930s. As international trade in farm products has expanded, so has the sensitivity of farm incomes to fluctuations in domestic and world economic conditions. Thus, while...

Agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) lags far behind all other regions of the world. A long list of policy experiments has yielded more evidence on what fails than on what works. We analyze a randomized control trial of a rare scaled-up success story: One Acre Fund's small...