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)...

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...

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 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...

Are well-functioning formal judicial institutions important for economic development, or can informal contracting arrangements provide adequate substitutes? This paper aims to answer this question using variation across industries in their reliance on contracts along with variation across Indian...

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...

The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of households, resulting in widespread poverty and food insecurity. To mitigate these effects, many governments have introduced additional benefits as part of their existing welfare schemes. However, there is...

In developing countries, one in four girls is married before turning 18, with adverse consequences for their own and their children's human capital. In this paper, we investigate whether laws can affect attitudes and behaviour towards child marriage - in a context in which the laws are not...