The Government of India initiated a program in 1994 to promote manufacturing in districts designated as backward. The way the backward districts were identified enables us to employ a regression discontinuity design to evaluate the impacts of the program. We find that the program's 5-year tax...

We develop a framework to analyze urban water tariff setting and its welfare implications and apply it to a panel of cities in the People's Republic of China in the 2000s. First, we find that peer cities' water tariff levels have a significant influence on a city's choice of tariffs. We use the...

Ground level ozone remains a serious problem in the United States. Because ozone non-attainment is a summer problem, episodic rather than continuous controls of ozone precursors are possible. We evaluate the costs and effectiveness of an episodic scheme that requires people to buy permits in...

We study the interaction between transit improvements and land use policies in the context of Bengaluru, one of India's largest cities. The city inaugurated a metro system in 2011. Yet it has low building heights even near metro stations, reflecting low floor-area ratio limits. We construct a...

Upstream nonpoint source pollution has become a significant threat to urban drinking water safety in the People's Republic of China. Payment for environmental services (PES) is seen as a promising mechanism to deal with the situation. In designing a sound PES, it is crucial to determine the...

This paper introduces a new city-level panel dataset constructed using satellite nighttime light imagery and grid population data. The dataset contains over 1,500 cities covering 43 economies of Asia and the Pacific from 1992 to 2016. With the dataset, we perform a variety of analyses for Asia...

Throughout 2020, national and subnational governments worldwide implemented nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to contain the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19). These included community quarantines, also known as lockdowns, of varying length, scope, and stringency that restricted...

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of financial sector development, with a view to deepening understanding of the rationale of development assistance to the financial sector of developing countries. The review leads to the following broad conclusions: (i)...

The widespread adoption of compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) have been advocated on the premise that it will result in significant savings in electricity and reduced carbon emissions. Using a household level survey of electrical lighting and usage in Pakistan, we examine the decision to...

This paper presents evidence on the spatial distribution and effects of urban agglomeration on firm innovation. It uses a unique dataset that consistently defines city boundaries and identifies firms' innovation-related activities across 25 developing countries in Asia. We find firm innovation...