This paper exploits exogenous variation in the natural topography of the United States to estimate the causal impact of inter-jurisdictional competition on income growth. We find that doubling the number of county governments in a metropolitan area leads to a 17% increase in the average annual...

What drives governments with similar revenues to provide very different amounts of goods with private sector substitutes? Education is a prime example. I use exogenous shocks to Brazilian municipalities' revenue during 1995–2008 generated by non-linearities in federal transfer laws to...

How does the amount of land youth expect to inherit affect their migration and employment decisions? This paper explores this question in the context of rural Ethiopia using panel data from 2010 and 2014. We estimate a household fixed-effects model and exploit exogenous variation in the timing...

How do conditional cash transfers impact health-related outcomes? This paper examines the 2010 randomized introduction of a program in Tanzania and finds nuanced impacts. An initial surge in clinic visits after 1.5 years -- due to more visits by those already complying with program health...

Identifying policies which can improve water sector management is critically important given the global burden of water-related disease. Each year, 1 in 10 child deaths — roughly 800,000 in total — is the direct result of diarrhea. Can private-sector participation (PSP) in the urban piped...

The migrant selection literature concentrates primarily on spatial patterns. We integrate two workhorses of the labor literature, the Roy and search models, to illustrate the implications of migration duration for patterns of selection. Theory and empirics show that temporary migrants are...