Hosting a mega-event is a costly activity of short duration. Still, cities frequently compete to become host of all types of events. This paper examines the effect of staging the largest and most important sporting event in the world, the Summer Olympic Games, on the host city. Applying a...

This paper exploits time and geographic variation in the adoption of Special Economic Zones in India to assess the direct and spillover effects of the program. We combine geocoded firm-level data and geocoded SEZs using a concentric ring approach, thus creating a novel dataset of firms with...

This review is framed around the exploration of a central hypothesis: A shift in public investment towards secondary towns from big cities will improve poverty reduction performance. Of course the hypothesis raises many questions. What exactly is the dichotomy of secondary towns versus big...

This paper exploits time and geographic variation in the adoption of Special Economic Zones in India to assess the direct and spillover effects of the program. We combine geocoded firm-level data and geocoded SEZs using a concentric ring approach, thus creating a novel dataset of firms with...

This paper investigates the impacts of neighborhoods on the economic outcomes of adults. We exploit one of the world's largest housing lottery programs and administrative data linking lottery registration, formal employment, and access to social programs in Brazil. Receiving a house has positive...

This paper investigates the impacts of neighborhoods on the economic outcomes of adults. We exploit one of the world's largest housing lottery programs and administrative data linking lottery registration, formal employment, and access to social programs in Brazil. Receiving a house has positive...

Fifty years ago, China sent more than 16 million urban youths aged 16-19 to rural villages to work and they spent between 1 and 10 years there. This is known as the "sent-down youth" (SDY) program. This paper examines how this internal migration impacted rural economic development in the regions...

Unlike most countries, Korea did not implement a lockdown in its battle against COVID-19, instead successfully relying on testing and contact tracing. Only one region, Daegu-Gyeongbuk, had a significant number of infections, traced to a religious sect. This allows us to estimate the causal...

Between 1979 and 2009, the German labour market moved along a Beveridge curve with changing slope that usually shifted outwards but once inwards. We employ an unobserved components model to simultaneously disentangle permanent and transitory components of matching efficiency and separation rate...

This paper studies how gradualism affects the welfare gains from trade, technology, and reforms. When people face adjustment frictions, gradual shocks create less adverse distributional effects in the short run. We show that there are welfare gains from inducing a more gradual transition via...