The construction of large dams is one of the most costly and controversial forms of public infrastructure investment in developing countries, but little is known about their impact. This paper studies the productivity and distributional effects of large dams in India. To account for endogenous...

In Côte d'Ivoire, as in much of Africa, husbands and wives farm different crops on separate plots. These different crops are differentially sensitive to particular kinds of rainfall shocks. We find that conditional on overall household expenditure, the composition of expenditure is sensitive to...

We revisit the classic semiparametric problem of inference on a low di-mensional parameter Ø0 in the presence of high-dimensional nuisance parameters Û0. We depart from the classical setting by allowing for Û0 to be so high-dimensional that the traditional assumptions, such as Donsker...

We propose strategies to estimate and make inference on key features of heterogeneous effects in randomized experiments. These key features include best linear predictors of the effects using machine learning proxies, average effects sorted by impact groups, and average characteristics of most...

Most modern supervised statistical/machine learning (ML) methods are explicitly designed to solve prediction problems very well. Achieving this goal does not imply that these methods automatically deliver good estimators of causal parameters. Examples of such parameters include individual...

This paper examines equilibrium and stability in symmetric two-player cheap-talk games. In particular, we characterize the set of neutrally stable outcomes in finite cheap-talk 2 x 2 coordination games. This set is finite and functionally independent of risk-dominance relations. As the number of...

The recent East Asian crisis has highlighted the relationship between financial development and output volatility. In this essay we develop a simple model of a small open economy producing a tradeable good using a non-tradeable input and where firms access to borrowings and investment depends on...