In the United States, the average 40-year-old plant employs more than seven times as many workers as the typical plant 5 years or younger. In contrast, surviving plants in India and Mexico exhibit much slower growth, roughly doubling in size over the same age range. The divergence in plant...

Resource misallocation can lower aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). We use microdata on manufacturing establishments to quantify the potential extent of misallocation in China and India versus the United States. We measure sizable gaps in marginal products of labor and capital across...

From 1997 through 2003, the UN Oil for Food Program allowed Iraq to export oil for humanitarian supplies. We hypothesize that Iraq deliberately set the price of its oil below market prices to solicit bribes from oil buyers. By comparing the price gap between Iraqi oil and its close substitutes...

We use a randomized evaluation of a Kenyan deworming program to estimate peer effects in technology adoption and to shed light on foreign aid donors' movement towards sustainable community provision of public goods. Deworming is a public good since much of its social benefit comes through...

Despite their importance, there is limited evidence on how institutions can be strengthened. Evaluating the effects of specific reforms is complicated by the lack of exogenous variation in institutions, the difficulty of measuring institutional performance, and the temptation to "cherry pick"...

Using a randomized evaluation in Kenya, we measure health impacts of spring protection, an investment that improves source water quality. We also estimate households' valuation of spring protection and simulate the welfare impacts of alternatives to the current system of common property rights...