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...

We delineate metropolitan areas (MAs) in the Philippines using cellphone user flow data to proxy for daily commutes. The exercise identifies a number of large MAs that are not officially recognized, and different spatial extents for the three officially designated MAs. The urban system aligns...