Disasters are frequent and clearly harmful in developing countries, but precisely estimating their overall cost and distributional impact is challenging. This paper proposes a microsimulation approach to do so rapidly, borrowing concepts from both poverty analysis and urban economics. Because...

Many governments in developing countries have pursued policies targeting specific geographic areas over the past several decades. However, only a few have rigorously evaluated the causal impact of these interventions. This paper examines the effectiveness of a prominent place-based policy in...

This paper proposes a methodology for identifying urban areas that combines subjective assessments with machine learning, and applies it to India, a country where several studies see the official urbanization rate as an under-estimate. For a representative sample of cities, towns and villages,...

This paper takes a fresh look at growth convergence in India, combining insights from macroeconomics and urban economics. It departs from the existing literature in three ways. First, the paper assesses growth patterns across districts and across places below the district level instead of taking...

This paper develops a tractable method to identify urban areas and applies it to India, where urbanization is messy. Google Earth images are assessed subjectively to determine whether a stratified large sample of Indian cities, towns and villages, as officially defined, are urban or rural in...

Policy makers in developing countries, including India, are increasingly sensitive to the links between spatial transformation and economic development. However, the empirical knowledge available on those links is most often insufficient to guide policy decisions. There is no shortage of case...

Using bilateral migration flow data from the 2010 population census of Nepal, this paper provides evidence on the importance of public infrastructure and services in determining migration flows. The empirical specification, based on a generalized nested logit model, corrects for the non-random...

During the past two decades many economies have opened their retail sector to foreign direct investment, yet little is known about possible implications of such liberalization on the economies of developing host countries. Using firm-level data from Romania, this study examines how the presence...

To date, the impact of foreign direct investment on market power and consumer welfare in developing countries has been relatively understudied. Utilizing a firm survey dataset from Vietnam, this paper first calculates firm-level markups for manufacturing firms and then analyzes the impact of...

Based on a comprehensive worldwide firm survey, this paper looks at how the business environment and economic agglomeration affect job creation, holding constant conventional determinants of firm growth, such as firm ownership, size, and age. The analysis finds that economic agglomeration is...