Although Africa has experienced rapid urbanization in recent decades, we know little about the process of urbanization across the continent. The paper exploits a natural experiment, the abolition of South African pass laws, to explore how exogenous population shocks affect the spatial...

Although Africa has experienced rapid urbanization in recent decades, we know little about the process of urbanization across the continent. The paper exploits a natural experiment, the abolition of South African pass laws, to explore how exogenous population shocks affect the spatial...

Social protection programs, common in developing countries, can be wide ranging. Expenditures on social schemes are large, but their effectiveness and ability to act as safety nets against shocks can be limited. This paper devises a tractable empirical framework to explore several hypotheses in...

This paper explores the spillover of protests across countries using data on nonviolent and spontaneous demonstrations for 200 countries from 2000 to 2020. Using an autoregressive spatial model, the analysis finds strong evidence of "contagious protests," with a catalyzing role of social media....

This paper uses a randomized community development program in rural Pakistan to assess the impact of citizen engagement on the quality of public health services. The program had a strong emphasis on organizing women, who also identified health services as a development priority at baseline....

By 2050, two-thirds of the world s population will live in cities, and the greatest growth in urban populations will take place in the least developed countries. This presents many governments with considerable challenges related to urban governance and the provision of services and...