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...

The global financial crisis and its aftermath have triggered extraordinary policy responses in advanced countries. The impacts of these policy responses—from asset price bubbles to currency depreciations—have often been felt in the developing world. As tapering talk evolves into actual...

Despite informality being the norm in conflict-affected countries, most estimates of the impact of conflict on economic activity rely on formal sector data. Using high-frequency data from Afghanistan, this paper assesses how surges in conflict intensity affect not only the formal sector, but...

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 presents a new dataset of comparable employment indicators for South Asian countries, constructed from more than 60 primary data sources from 2001 to 2017. The main contribution of the paper is to curate the information provided by individual respondents to censuses and surveys, in a...

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...

Evening-hour luminosity observed using satellites is a good proxy for economic activity. The strengths of measuring economic activity using nightlight measurements include that the data capture informal activity, are available in near real-time, are cheap to obtain, and can be used to conduct...

Despite record economic growth for more than a decade, poverty has remained stubbornly high in Afghanistan, especially in the regions that suffered less from conflict. This paper aims to explain this paradox by combining a model of conflict intensity at the province level over period 2007-14...

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...