The paper provides evidence of the effects of changes in transport costs on the geographic concentration of industries. The analysis uses micro-level commodity flow data and micro-geographic plant-level data to construct industry-specific ad valorem trucking rates and continuous measures of...

Small-scale cross-border trade provides opportunities for economic gains in many developing countries. Yet cross-border traders—many of whom are women—face harassment and corruption, which can undermine these potential gains. This paper presents evidence from a randomized controlled trial of...

Deeper regional integration can be beneficial especially for regions along international borders. It can open up new markets on opposite sides of borders and give consumers wider access to cheaper goods. This paper uses data from five contiguous districts of India, Nepal, and Bangladesh in the...

Regression discontinuity designs applied to a set of household surveys from the 1980-90s allow to examine whether Cote d'Ivoire's aggregate wealth was translated at the borders of neighboring countries. At the border of Ghana and at the end of the 1980s, large discontinuities are detected for...

Internal mobility is a critical component of economic growth and development, as it enables the reallocation of labor to more productive opportunities across sectors and regions. Using detailed district-to-district migration data from the 2001 Census of India, the paper highlights the role of...

Although market concentration is one of the main impediments to productivity growth globally, data constraints have limited its analysis to developed countries or cross-country studies based on definitions of market concentration across nations and industries. This paper takes advantage of a...

A rigorous understanding of the developmental effect of fiscal transfers to subnational governments remains an important policy research issue globally. This paper exploits a novel dataset of 20 years of municipal poverty maps and local public finances to study the effects on local welfare of a...

The authors follow the Hellerstein, Neumark, and Troske (1999) framework to estimate marginal productivity differentials and compare them with estimated relative wages. The analysis provides evidence on productivity and nonproductivity-based determinations of wages. Special emphasis is given to...