Education is thought to be central to economic development. Yet, relatively little is known about how developing countries might advance school participation. In November, 2001 the Indian Supreme Court issued a remarkable interim order directing errant Indian states to other children in...

Large-scale land acquisition has increased dramatically in recent years. The question whether land deals can benefit both the local population and the investor is therefore high on the international agenda. Contract farming is discussed as a possible solution but studies identifying the causal...

With the rising demand for agricultural land, land deals must be designed to benefit not only the investors but also the local population. This paper looks at two ways this might be done for farmers in the vicinity of a large-scale oil palm investment in Ghana: contract farming and secure...

This article analyzes the impact of a local broadband expansion policy on electoral turnout and party vote share. We exploit a unique policy intervention involving staged broadband infrastructure installation across rural municipalities in the Province of Trento (Italy), thus generating a source...

This paper empirically examines the impact of self-managed working time (SMWT) on firm performance using panel data from German establishments. As a policy for the decentralization of decision rights, SMWT provides employees with extensive control over scheduling individual working time. From a...

We study whether raising instructional time can crowd out student pro-social behaviour. To this end, we exploit a large educational reform in Germany that has raised weekly instructional time for high school students by 12.5% as a quasi-natural experiment. We find that this rise has a negative...

Does single motherhood adversely affect infant health? This question is not easy to answer because of the endogeneity of coresidence during pregnancy. In this paper, we exploit quasi-natural variation in single motherhood from the moment of conception to that of birth arising from marriageable...

The paper studies the impact of a switch from free to charged highway provision on firm numbers and private sector employment in a cross-section of Portuguese municipalities. It exploits the fact that highway tolls in Portugal were unexpectedly raised in reaction to the financial crisis to...