Beyond the role of economic forces, many theories of economic geography emphasize the way politics can shape the spacial configuration of economic activity. We investigate the impact of changes in political regimes on industrial concentration using 30 years of data on Indonesian manufacturers....

We extend the sudden stops literature by allowing crisis episodes to be caused by either the retreat of global investors, as is assumed but not shown in the extant literature, or the sudden flight of local investors. We find that almost half of the previously defined sudden stops are actually...

We use a natural experiment in Indonesia to provide causal evidence on the role of location-specific human capital and skill transferability in shaping the spatial distribution of productivity. From 1979-1988, the Transmigration Program relocated two million migrants from rural Java and Bali to...

This paper estimates the local welfare impacts of road maintenance investments. We instrument road quality exploiting Indonesia's two-step budgeting process for allocating funding to local road authorities. Using comprehensive data on road quality from 1990-2007, we find that better roads help...