There is limited causal evidence on the effects of different public procurement regulations on project quality and value-for-money for projects funded by national governments and foreign aid donors. This paper uses policy and experimental variation to study how two key contracting...

This paper explores the labor market returns to working on a victorious political campaign. Using unique administrative data from Brazil, we track the earnings and employment of campaign workers before and after close elections spanning nearly 20 years. We identify sizable returns to working for...

Relational contracts - informal self-enforcing agreements sustained by repeated interactions - are ubiquitous both within and across organizational boundaries. This review highlights recent empirical contributions in selected areas. We begin by reviewing some recent work that explicitly takes...

We investigate the long-term effects of export opportunities to a large destination market on multinational affiliates and domestic firms in a low-income host country. The US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement reduced US import tariffs on exports from Vietnam. Tariff reductions led to entry of...

We collect time-use data for entrepreneurs and their workers in over 1,000 manufacturing firms in urban Uganda. We document limited labor specialization within the firm for establishments of all sizes and argue that this is likely due to the prevalence of product customization. We then develop a...

Governments in developing countries have low fiscal capacity yet face pressures to provide public goods and services, leading them to rely on various unusual fiscal arrangements. We document one such - hitherto unexplored - arrangement: informal fiscal systems that rely on local bureaucrats to...

We analyze how expropriation risk reduces incentives for innovation and reallocates resources from the innovative sector, building on Romer's(1990) model. Our framework predicts the R&D expenditure, the share of human capital in R&D, the number of patents, technical progress, and economic growth...

It has been argued that since 2014, under the BJP-led central government, welfare benefits in India have become better targeted and less prone to clientelistic control by state and local governments. Arguably this has helped to increase the vote share of the BJP vis-a-vis regional parties. We...

We study the provision of financial services to small firms, consumers, and workers in developing countries as part of value chain relationships: value chain microfinance (VCMF). We first explore how VCMF can both overcome barriers to financial access - including asymmetric information,...

This paper offers a new approach to measuring the size of the informal economy based on VAT data for the European Union. Although data intensive, our EVADE measure is simpler and more transparent than existing measures. EVADE also shows more variation across countries of Europe than earlier...