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Can personalized mentorship by experienced workers improve young job seekers’ labor market trajectories? To answer this question, in the first chapter of this dissertation I study “Meet Your Future”, a mentorship program we designed and randomized which assisted a subset of 1,112 vocational students during their school-to- work transitions in urban Uganda, where youth unemployment is high. The program improved participants’ labor market outcomes. Relative to the control, mentored students were 27% more likely to work three months after graduation; after one year, they earned 18% more. Call transcripts from mentorship sessions and survey data reveal that mentorship primarily improved outcomes through information about entry level jobs and labor market dynamics, and not through job referrals, information about specific vacancies, or through building search capital. Consistent with this finding, mentored students revise downward their overly optimistic beliefs about starting wages and revise upward beliefs about the returns to experience. As a result, they lower their reservation wages and turn down fewer job offers. The results emphasizes the role of distorted beliefs among job seekers in prolonging youth unemployment and proposes a cost effective and scalable policy with an estimated internal rate of return of 300%. In the second chapter of this dissertation, I move to investigate whether hiring processes themselves can disadvantage women and consequently explain part of the gender wage gap and the occupational segregation documented in many labor markets across the world. Specifically, I look at referrals, a significant factor in hiring decisions and one of the primary ways to land a job. With my coauthor, we conduct a correspondence experiment to examine how referrals by firm employees may perpetuate occupational gender segregation among Uganda’s skilled workers. We start by presenting pairs of gender-differing profiles of potential candidates to workers in a wide

An accurate understanding of how policies and programs affect individual and household welfare requires correctly modeling household decision making. This dissertation examines standard assumptions of the collective model that household members achieve efficiency (Essays 1 and 3), have perfect information (Essays 2 and 3), communicate, and make binding commitments (Essay 3). I analyze the theoretical implications of relaxing these assumptions and empirically assess how well these assumptions reflect reality in diverse contexts. The first essay calls into question the assumption that households in rural Ethiopia operate on the Pareto efficient frontier. The second essay examines differences in spouses' responses to questions regarding women's asset ownership and participation in household decisions in Nepal, and what these differences tell us about women's well-being. The third essay analyzes how introducing cellular network access in the Philippines affects wives’ control over household resources and information asymmetries between spouses.Do Property Rights Affect the Efficiency and Intrahousehold Labor Allocations of Rural Ethiopian Households?If the share of land that a husband or wife claims in divorce differs from his or her share of other assets, does this induce inefficient allocations of productive resources? To address this question, the first essay examines the effects of two policies that altered the distribution of property rights upon marital dissolution in Ethiopia: (1) joint land certification, which shifted land rights from husbands to both husbands and wives and (2) changes to regional Family Codes, which shifted non-land rights from husbands to a more equal division between spouses. Using two-way fixed effects, I analyze both panel and repeated cross-sectional data from rural Ethiopia. My results suggest that, when regional Family Codes are in place, joint land certification increases real household consumption per capita and the probability of bei

This paper describes emerging work in development economics at the intersection of hope, poverty and material prosperity. We blend Sen’s capability approach and Snyder’s hope theory to provide a conceptual framework for integrating hope into development eco-nomics. This framework emphasizes the interplay of internal and external constraints, belief updating and differential malleability of hope between children and adults. The paper then surveys the recent literature in development economics related to Snyder’s components of hope: aspirations, pathways and agency. This survey focuses primarily on the domains of education, employment and enterprise and uses the Sen-Snyder framework to synthesize patterns in these results. It concludes with a discussion of promising research frontiers for development economists, including the need to understand how complementarities between hope components shape realized outcomes and to accommodate distinctive features of hope as it is experienced by the poor in non-Western contexts.

This paper describes emerging work in development economics at the intersection of hope, poverty and material prosperity. We blend Sen’s capability approach and Snyder’s hope theory to provide a conceptual framework for integrating hope into development eco-nomics. This framework emphasizes the interplay of internal and external constraints, belief updating and differential malleability of hope between children and adults. The paper then surveys the recent literature in development economics related to Snyder’s components of hope: aspirations, pathways and agency. This survey focuses primarily on the domains of education, employment and enterprise and uses the Sen-Snyder framework to synthesize patterns in these results. It concludes with a discussion of promising research frontiers for development economists, including the need to understand how complementarities between hope components shape realized outcomes and to accommodate distinctive features of hope as it is experienced by the poor in non-Western contexts.

An accurate understanding of how policies and programs affect individual and household welfare requires correctly modeling household decision making. This dissertation examines standard assumptions of the collective model that household members achieve efficiency (Essays 1 and 3), have perfect information (Essays 2 and 3), communicate, and make binding commitments (Essay 3). I analyze the theoretical implications of relaxing these assumptions and empirically assess how well these assumptions reflect reality in diverse contexts. The first essay calls into question the assumption that households in rural Ethiopia operate on the Pareto efficient frontier. The second essay examines differences in spouses' responses to questions regarding women's asset ownership and participation in household decisions in Nepal, and what these differences tell us about women's well-being. The third essay analyzes how introducing cellular network access in the Philippines affects wives’ control over household resources and information asymmetries between spouses.Do Property Rights Affect the Efficiency and Intrahousehold Labor Allocations of Rural Ethiopian Households?If the share of land that a husband or wife claims in divorce differs from his or her share of other assets, does this induce inefficient allocations of productive resources? To address this question, the first essay examines the effects of two policies that altered the distribution of property rights upon marital dissolution in Ethiopia: (1) joint land certification, which shifted land rights from husbands to both husbands and wives and (2) changes to regional Family Codes, which shifted non-land rights from husbands to a more equal division between spouses. Using two-way fixed effects, I analyze both panel and repeated cross-sectional data from rural Ethiopia. My results suggest that, when regional Family Codes are in place, joint land certification increases real household consumption per capita and the probability of bei

This dissertation comprises three studies on development economics and state capacity. In the first two chapters, developed through a partnership with the Tax Authority in Honduras, I examine the design and enforcement of tax policies when state capacity is low. State-provided public goods are crucial for economic development, and collecting taxes is necessary to finance the state. The first study evaluates the impact of a policy aimed at increasing tax payments from large corporations and highlights the importance of third-party information on enforcement. The second study reports the result of a large-scale experiment with taxpayers, aimed at estimating the compliance effects of informing taxpayers about the Tax Authority’s knowledge on their transactions. The final chapter focuses on another dimension of state capacity and development: the selection of state personnel that are key to the delivery of public services. In that chapter, I study whether the impersonal examinations used to select judges in Brazil are predictive about their performance on the job.In chapter 1, co-authored with Felipe Lobel and Pedro Zúniga, I study how corporations in Honduras responded to the introduction of a minimum income tax, a provision that taxes firms on revenue when reported profits are low. Minimum taxes are recommended to tax authorities in lower-income countries by the International Monetary Fund and figure prominently in current debates on international tax cooperation. Evidence on their impact on tax collection and behavioral responses of firms is nonetheless still scarce. Using non- linearities in the tax schedule introduced by the policy and tools from the bunching literature, I show that the reaction of corporations reveals substantial evasion under profit taxation and a large elasticity of reported revenue. I also document that the enforcement environment faced by firms is important in determining these responses, highlighting the fact that the trade-offs between poli

This dissertation consists of three contributions to the literature at the intersection of development economics and public economics, set in the context of Uganda but with broader applications. In each of the three chapters, I use rigorous identification and a rich variety of administrative data to answer interesting and challenging questions about a variety of ways in which the public sector influences and is influenced by economic development.The first chapter studies the subnational fiscal response to international aid, and examines how other donors and the Ugandan government respond to exogenous increases in the amount of World Bank funds allocated to local projects. While similar analysis has been done before at the country level, my analysis is the first that is focused on the subnational level. I find evidence of a ``crowding in'' of donors, whereby some other donors follow the lead of the World Bank in determining where to allocate funding across Uganda's smaller administrative units. The crowding in of aid, and the subsequent potential for overspending and diminishing marginal returns, may help explain why international aid sees large returns viewed locally, but smaller returns on national levels.The second chapter focuses on a randomized control trial which I conducted with the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), studying tax compliance in the context of low state capacity. Although the ability of the state to collect tax revenue is crucial for development, relatively little is known about what drives tax compliance and how it can be improved in poor, low-capacity countries. I show that low-cost, easily implementable tax compliance interventions can succeed, testing a highly effective tax encouragement scheme in conjunction with URA. I find a 6x rate of return to sending a simple text message to prospective taxpayers in the days before taxes are due, which increases to 13x when considering an enforcement-focused message; this intervention is estimated to have

Drawing on theory from development economics and industrial organization, I study the economics of rural firms and markets to understand how different types of shocks affect firm operations. I examine three types of shocks: technology, weather, and prices. I use a combination of randomized experimental variation and quasi-experimental variation to identify the effect of each type of shock on small firm outcomes. The primary outcomes are relational contracting with suppliers and customers, firm performance (sales, profits, hiring of workers), number of competitors, and changes to input and output prices.In the first essay, I evaluate how a technology shock designed to lower search costs affects how firms interact with their suppliers and customers. For small firms, search frictions interfere with learning about new suppliers in their upstream market, and raise the cost of meeting new customers in their downstream market. Using a randomized experiment of 507 small firms, I study the impact of a digital phonebook that lowers the cost of accessing new business and customer contacts. Participating firms are split into a control and treatment group with two variations: 1) a phonebook listing that is visible to upstream suppliers in urban areas, and 2) a phonebook listing that is visible to downstream customers in rural areas. I find that treated firms increase relational contracting with their suppliers and decrease it with their customers. Yet, there is no strong evidence that the number of new customers or suppliers increases. This pattern suggests that being listed in the phonebook caused firms to update their valuation of relational contracts and respond by negotiating better terms with suppliers and customers.In the second essay, I study how a weather shock that lowers agricultural production affects rural firms whose customer base experiences crop losses. In the absence of insurance and credit markets, the effect of adverse weather shocks on rural firms is ambiguous

Complex policy problems like climate change and illicit finance require a diverse methodological repertoire and an agnostic approach to selecting the appropriate analytical tool to accomplish discrete inferential tasks. Drawing from the disciplines of political science, economics, and statistical data science, this dissertation tackles three distinct problems on causal evaluation, measurement, and missing data. The first paper evaluates the causal effect of a climate mitigation policy on the carbon emissions of the UK. Using a synthetic control estimator, this chapter finds that post-treatment emissions in the UK were 10% lower than what they would have been without the climate policy. The results imply that voluntary climate reforms that make concessions to domestic producers are still able to meaningfully reduce emissions, even in the absence of a legally binding global climate treaty. The second paper presents a novel methodology to measure illicit trade flows and originates the "atlas of misinvoicing", the first database to provide comprehensive bilateral estimates of the dollar amount of misinvoiced trade disaggregated by commodity sector for 167 countries during 2000-2018. Results show that African countries lost on average $86 billion a year in gross illicit outflows during that period, and that the biggest source of illicit trade on the continent was the natural resources sector. The findings suggest that combating illicit financial flows will be crucial to providing finance for sustainable development and to promoting domestic resource mobilization in poor countries. The third paper proposes a machine learning approach to ameliorate the problem of missing data from developing countries, where administrative systems for data collection tend to be weaker. Some African countries do not provide customs declarations, which the "atlas" method requires as input data. This chapter predicts illicit trade using machine learning models that are trained on readily avai

Complex policy problems like climate change and illicit finance require a diverse methodological repertoire and an agnostic approach to selecting the appropriate analytical tool to accomplish discrete inferential tasks. Drawing from the disciplines of political science, economics, and statistical data science, this dissertation tackles three distinct problems on causal evaluation, measurement, and missing data. The first paper evaluates the causal effect of a climate mitigation policy on the carbon emissions of the UK. Using a synthetic control estimator, this chapter finds that post-treatment emissions in the UK were 10% lower than what they would have been without the climate policy. The results imply that voluntary climate reforms that make concessions to domestic producers are still able to meaningfully reduce emissions, even in the absence of a legally binding global climate treaty. The second paper presents a novel methodology to measure illicit trade flows and originates the "atlas of misinvoicing", the first database to provide comprehensive bilateral estimates of the dollar amount of misinvoiced trade disaggregated by commodity sector for 167 countries during 2000-2018. Results show that African countries lost on average $86 billion a year in gross illicit outflows during that period, and that the biggest source of illicit trade on the continent was the natural resources sector. The findings suggest that combating illicit financial flows will be crucial to providing finance for sustainable development and to promoting domestic resource mobilization in poor countries. The third paper proposes a machine learning approach to ameliorate the problem of missing data from developing countries, where administrative systems for data collection tend to be weaker. Some African countries do not provide customs declarations, which the "atlas" method requires as input data. This chapter predicts illicit trade using machine learning models that are trained on readily avai

This dissertation comprises three studies on development economics and state capacity. In the first two chapters, developed through a partnership with the Tax Authority in Honduras, I examine the design and enforcement of tax policies when state capacity is low. State-provided public goods are crucial for economic development, and collecting taxes is necessary to finance the state. The first study evaluates the impact of a policy aimed at increasing tax payments from large corporations and highlights the importance of third-party information on enforcement. The second study reports the result of a large-scale experiment with taxpayers, aimed at estimating the compliance effects of informing taxpayers about the Tax Authority’s knowledge on their transactions. The final chapter focuses on another dimension of state capacity and development: the selection of state personnel that are key to the delivery of public services. In that chapter, I study whether the impersonal examinations used to select judges in Brazil are predictive about their performance on the job.In chapter 1, co-authored with Felipe Lobel and Pedro Zúniga, I study how corporations in Honduras responded to the introduction of a minimum income tax, a provision that taxes firms on revenue when reported profits are low. Minimum taxes are recommended to tax authorities in lower-income countries by the International Monetary Fund and figure prominently in current debates on international tax cooperation. Evidence on their impact on tax collection and behavioral responses of firms is nonetheless still scarce. Using non- linearities in the tax schedule introduced by the policy and tools from the bunching literature, I show that the reaction of corporations reveals substantial evasion under profit taxation and a large elasticity of reported revenue. I also document that the enforcement environment faced by firms is important in determining these responses, highlighting the fact that the trade-offs between poli

This dissertation consists of three contributions to the literature at the intersection of development economics and public economics, set in the context of Uganda but with broader applications. In each of the three chapters, I use rigorous identification and a rich variety of administrative data to answer interesting and challenging questions about a variety of ways in which the public sector influences and is influenced by economic development.The first chapter studies the subnational fiscal response to international aid, and examines how other donors and the Ugandan government respond to exogenous increases in the amount of World Bank funds allocated to local projects. While similar analysis has been done before at the country level, my analysis is the first that is focused on the subnational level. I find evidence of a ``crowding in'' of donors, whereby some other donors follow the lead of the World Bank in determining where to allocate funding across Uganda's smaller administrative units. The crowding in of aid, and the subsequent potential for overspending and diminishing marginal returns, may help explain why international aid sees large returns viewed locally, but smaller returns on national levels.The second chapter focuses on a randomized control trial which I conducted with the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), studying tax compliance in the context of low state capacity. Although the ability of the state to collect tax revenue is crucial for development, relatively little is known about what drives tax compliance and how it can be improved in poor, low-capacity countries. I show that low-cost, easily implementable tax compliance interventions can succeed, testing a highly effective tax encouragement scheme in conjunction with URA. I find a 6x rate of return to sending a simple text message to prospective taxpayers in the days before taxes are due, which increases to 13x when considering an enforcement-focused message; this intervention is estimated to have

Drawing on theory from development economics and industrial organization, I study the economics of rural firms and markets to understand how different types of shocks affect firm operations. I examine three types of shocks: technology, weather, and prices. I use a combination of randomized experimental variation and quasi-experimental variation to identify the effect of each type of shock on small firm outcomes. The primary outcomes are relational contracting with suppliers and customers, firm performance (sales, profits, hiring of workers), number of competitors, and changes to input and output prices.In the first essay, I evaluate how a technology shock designed to lower search costs affects how firms interact with their suppliers and customers. For small firms, search frictions interfere with learning about new suppliers in their upstream market, and raise the cost of meeting new customers in their downstream market. Using a randomized experiment of 507 small firms, I study the impact of a digital phonebook that lowers the cost of accessing new business and customer contacts. Participating firms are split into a control and treatment group with two variations: 1) a phonebook listing that is visible to upstream suppliers in urban areas, and 2) a phonebook listing that is visible to downstream customers in rural areas. I find that treated firms increase relational contracting with their suppliers and decrease it with their customers. Yet, there is no strong evidence that the number of new customers or suppliers increases. This pattern suggests that being listed in the phonebook caused firms to update their valuation of relational contracts and respond by negotiating better terms with suppliers and customers.In the second essay, I study how a weather shock that lowers agricultural production affects rural firms whose customer base experiences crop losses. In the absence of insurance and credit markets, the effect of adverse weather shocks on rural firms is ambiguous

An understanding of household finance in rural communities is vital to poverty reduction strategies in the developing world. Informal moneylenders continue to occupy a large part of the financial landscape in many developing countries, and policy interventions often focus on reducing the need for informal debt. In this dissertation, I focus on rural India, and study the interaction between the formal and informal financial sectors, how credit and savings policies impact local rural labor markets, and how labor market policies impact local credit markets.In the first chapter, I study the relationship between formal and informal credit markets. These two sectors might either compete with each other, or be embedded in a vertical relationship with informal lenders on-lending formal loans, or both. I test this by analyzing whether credit market responses to demand shocks vary across environments with high and low supplies of formal credit. Exploiting rainfall shocks as exogenous changes to household incomes, I find that increases in incomes raise household borrowing from informal sources primarily due to higher borrowing for purchases of durable goods. This increase in borrowing is accompanied by an increase in informal loan interest rates, pointing to a demand response. I then exploit plausibly exogenous variation in formal credit supply, and find that the demand responses previously observed are absent when there are contractions in formal credit, suggesting complementarities between formal and informal credit. I validate this through a qualitative survey of informal moneylenders, who indicate using loans from banks as lending capital. These results suggest that informal moneylenders play an intermediating role between borrowers and formal financial institutions, contributing to their persistence in the credit landscape.In the second chapter, I turn to credit market policy interventions. Federal and state governments in India have relied on women’s self-help groups (SH

This dissertation consists of three chapters which relate to public officials’ capacity and incentives to improve public services.Chapter 1 examines a setting in which government seeks to augment its capacity by enlisting the private sector. It uses a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to measure the effect of a Liberian school reform which outsourced management of public primary schools to private providers. It finds that outsourced public schools saw learning gains of 0.18 standard deviations in both English and mathematics on average, but the effects varied a lot by private provider. Chapter 2 turns to the question of whether improved public services yield electoral rewards for the officials responsible. It leverages the random variation in learning gains provided by Chapter 1’s randomized school reform in Liberia. On average, voters near treated schools were 3 percentage points less likely to vote for the incumbent party’s candidate than those near control schools. This negative average electoral effect, however, masks important heterogeneity. The negative electoral impact of the reform was concentrated in places where the reform reduced children’s learning. In places where the reform significantly improved test scores, it also produced electoral rewards. Chapter 3 also seeks to measure the electoral gains to public good provision, focusing on the construction of the Interstate Highway System (IHS) in the United States of America. It uses a shift-share estimator to isolate exogenous variation in the timing of IHS construction by county. It finds that a mile of IHS construction in an election year increases county-level vote share for the incumbent governor’s party by 0.6-2.2 percentage points during the period 1950-1972. These essays provide new empirical evidence of democratic accountability for public service provision, even as they illuminate directions for future research into the conditions in which democratic accountability binds.

An understanding of household finance in rural communities is vital to poverty reduction strategies in the developing world. Informal moneylenders continue to occupy a large part of the financial landscape in many developing countries, and policy interventions often focus on reducing the need for informal debt. In this dissertation, I focus on rural India, and study the interaction between the formal and informal financial sectors, how credit and savings policies impact local rural labor markets, and how labor market policies impact local credit markets.In the first chapter, I study the relationship between formal and informal credit markets. These two sectors might either compete with each other, or be embedded in a vertical relationship with informal lenders on-lending formal loans, or both. I test this by analyzing whether credit market responses to demand shocks vary across environments with high and low supplies of formal credit. Exploiting rainfall shocks as exogenous changes to household incomes, I find that increases in incomes raise household borrowing from informal sources primarily due to higher borrowing for purchases of durable goods. This increase in borrowing is accompanied by an increase in informal loan interest rates, pointing to a demand response. I then exploit plausibly exogenous variation in formal credit supply, and find that the demand responses previously observed are absent when there are contractions in formal credit, suggesting complementarities between formal and informal credit. I validate this through a qualitative survey of informal moneylenders, who indicate using loans from banks as lending capital. These results suggest that informal moneylenders play an intermediating role between borrowers and formal financial institutions, contributing to their persistence in the credit landscape.In the second chapter, I turn to credit market policy interventions. Federal and state governments in India have relied on women’s self-help groups (SH

This dissertation consists of three chapters which relate to public officials’ capacity and incentives to improve public services.Chapter 1 examines a setting in which government seeks to augment its capacity by enlisting the private sector. It uses a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to measure the effect of a Liberian school reform which outsourced management of public primary schools to private providers. It finds that outsourced public schools saw learning gains of 0.18 standard deviations in both English and mathematics on average, but the effects varied a lot by private provider. Chapter 2 turns to the question of whether improved public services yield electoral rewards for the officials responsible. It leverages the random variation in learning gains provided by Chapter 1’s randomized school reform in Liberia. On average, voters near treated schools were 3 percentage points less likely to vote for the incumbent party’s candidate than those near control schools. This negative average electoral effect, however, masks important heterogeneity. The negative electoral impact of the reform was concentrated in places where the reform reduced children’s learning. In places where the reform significantly improved test scores, it also produced electoral rewards. Chapter 3 also seeks to measure the electoral gains to public good provision, focusing on the construction of the Interstate Highway System (IHS) in the United States of America. It uses a shift-share estimator to isolate exogenous variation in the timing of IHS construction by county. It finds that a mile of IHS construction in an election year increases county-level vote share for the incumbent governor’s party by 0.6-2.2 percentage points during the period 1950-1972. These essays provide new empirical evidence of democratic accountability for public service provision, even as they illuminate directions for future research into the conditions in which democratic accountability binds.

We assess evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on long-run economic productivity and living standards in poor countries. We first document that several studies estimate large positive long-run impacts, but that relatively few existing RCTs have been evaluated over the long run. We next present evidence from a systematic survey of existing RCTs, with a focus on cash transfer and child health programs, and show that a meaningful subset can realistically be evaluated for long-run effects. We discuss ways to bridge the gap between the burgeoning number of development RCTs and the limited number that have been followed up to date, including through new panel (longitudinal) data; improved participant tracking methods; alternative research designs; and access to administrative, remote sensing, and cell phone data. We conclude that the rise of development economics RCTs since roughly 2000 provides a novel opportunity to generate high-quality evidence on the long-run drivers of living standards.

This dissertation studies a notion called access-based beliefs, the idea that access to an alternative has a direct impact on beliefs of its value. As an example, individual's may lower their beliefs of alternatives to which they have low access, a phenomenon colloquially known as sour grapes. Using multiple settings in the lab and field, I demonstrate existence of access-based beliefs consistent with the sour grapes hypothesis and provide evidence for how it may be prevalent in real-world settings with an emphasis on the poor. In chapter 1, in an environment where learning channels are controlled for, I provide a proof-of-concept of access-based beliefs, showing that lower access to a subjective lottery reduces revealed beliefs of its value. In chapter 2, I study access-based beliefs in a real-world setting. I show that lowering access to a real-world investment (an SAT prep package) lowers beliefs of its expected effectiveness and reduces investment in it amongst a subsample of the population that would be expected to have the highest demand for it. In chapter 3, I explore the notion of relative access, that is, the value of an alternative is a function of whether or not others possess it. I find that a small but significant portion of individuals display a preference for conformity or non-conformity in consumption based on the societal distribution.

This dissertation presents a three-part study in development economics. Each chapter investigates how technological innovations enable firms and individuals to overcome problems of asymmetric information - whether it be monitoring devices to help firms overcome problems of moral hazard; online job-boards to overcome search and matching frictions for job-seekers; or new agricultural techniques to increase information diffusion within social networks. The first chapter examines the problem of moral hazard in employer--employee contracting and how this may be an important barrier to firm efficiency and growth in the developing world. To do so, we run an RCT with a fleet of 255 minibuses (matatus) in Nairobi, Kenya, where we introduce monitoring devices that track real-time vehicle location, daily productivity, and safety statistics. We randomize whether minibus owners have access to these monitoring data using a novel mobile app. This information allows owners in the treatment group to observe a more precise signal of driver effort, the amount of revenue drivers collected in fares, and the extent to which the driver engages in reckless driving. We find that treated vehicle owners modify the terms of the contract by decreasing the rental price they demand. Drivers respond by working more hours, decreasing behaviors that damage the vehicle, and under-reporting revenue by less. These changes improve firm profits and reduce management costs, thereby helping treated firms grow. The device also improves owners' trust in their drivers, which drivers say makes their job easier. Finally, we investigate whether these gains to the company come at the expense of passenger safety, in an environment where accidents are common. While we do not find any evidence that conditions deteriorate, offering detailed information on driving behavior also does not \emph{improve} safety. Only by incentivizing drivers through an additional cash treatment do we detect safety improvements. The secon

Collecting data to inform policy decisions is an ongoing global challenge. While some data collection has become routine, certain populations remain difficult to reach. From targeting social protection programs in densely-populated urban areas to reaching the ``last mile'' of infrastructure coverage, data collection and service delivery go hand-in-hand. Understanding the populations that live in urban communities as well as remote villages can help to tailor the design, targeting, and implementation of development programs. New sources of information have the potential to improve awareness of the needs and preferences of individuals, households, and communities.The goal of this dissertation is to provide multiple vantage points on the role that data, community input, and individual preferences can play in informing development policy. The empirical investigation presented in this dissertation covers two studies in Liberia and one in the Philippines. The unifying theme of the three chapters is the exploration of new sources of information about hard-to-reach populations.In the first chapter, I seek to describe and explain how community members would prefer to see a cash grant program targeted. Cash grant programs are widely popular. However, targeting of these, as well as other social protection programs in densely-populated urban areas, is a challenging undertaking. I take a first principal's approach to assessing individual preferences for targeting. I find that individuals express a clear preference for selecting community members that are similar to themselves. This holds true in the first stage of the study when I asked people to nominate knowledgeable community members to target a social protection program. It also holds true when I asked community members to target a cash grant. The presence of homophily, widely observed in social networks, is an important factor to consider when leveraging private information from individuals.In the second chapter, I present

This dissertation combines three empirical studies aimed at addressing one of the developing world’s leading causes of death – exposure to household air pollution from using biomass as a cooking fuel –which is responsible for millions of premature deaths annually and contributes to global climate change. The first study tests the effects of a soft commitment device on eliminating biomass use among households in India who have access to a clean fuel, LPG. The second and third studies explore reducing biomass use through a fuel-efficient biomass cookstove among a population in Uganda who does not have access to clean fuels. The second study tests the effects of selling a fuel-efficient cookstove (at the market price) on biomass use. The third study focuses on the methodology behind measuring stove use by comparing four methods of measurement.The first chapter explores how a commitment mechanism may help households who use a mix of biomass and clean cooking fuels to fully transition to clean fuels. Most Indian households now own an LPG stove and one LPG cylinder. However, many households continue to regularly use indoor biomass-fueled mud stoves (i.e., chulhas) alongside LPG. Focusing on this population in rural Maharashtra, India, this study tests the effects of conditioning a sales offer for a spare LPG cylinder on a soft commitment device requiring initially disabling indoor chulhas. We find that almost all relevant households (>98%) were willing to accept the commitment device. Indoor chulha use decreased by 90% when the sales offer included the commitment device, compared to a 23% decrease without it. If the effects are persistent, this intervention may be one of the most cost-effective means to save lives among tens of millions of Indian households. Using WHO-CHOICE criteria and conservative assumptions, this intervention generates benefits roughly 20 times larger than the costs.The second chapter, co-authored with Theresa Beltramo, Garrick Blalock, David I. L

This dissertation studies a notion called access-based beliefs, the idea that access to an alternative has a direct impact on beliefs of its value. As an example, individual's may lower their beliefs of alternatives to which they have low access, a phenomenon colloquially known as sour grapes. Using multiple settings in the lab and field, I demonstrate existence of access-based beliefs consistent with the sour grapes hypothesis and provide evidence for how it may be prevalent in real-world settings with an emphasis on the poor. In chapter 1, in an environment where learning channels are controlled for, I provide a proof-of-concept of access-based beliefs, showing that lower access to a subjective lottery reduces revealed beliefs of its value. In chapter 2, I study access-based beliefs in a real-world setting. I show that lowering access to a real-world investment (an SAT prep package) lowers beliefs of its expected effectiveness and reduces investment in it amongst a subsample of the population that would be expected to have the highest demand for it. In chapter 3, I explore the notion of relative access, that is, the value of an alternative is a function of whether or not others possess it. I find that a small but significant portion of individuals display a preference for conformity or non-conformity in consumption based on the societal distribution.

This dissertation presents a three-part study in development economics. Each chapter investigates how technological innovations enable firms and individuals to overcome problems of asymmetric information - whether it be monitoring devices to help firms overcome problems of moral hazard; online job-boards to overcome search and matching frictions for job-seekers; or new agricultural techniques to increase information diffusion within social networks. The first chapter examines the problem of moral hazard in employer--employee contracting and how this may be an important barrier to firm efficiency and growth in the developing world. To do so, we run an RCT with a fleet of 255 minibuses (matatus) in Nairobi, Kenya, where we introduce monitoring devices that track real-time vehicle location, daily productivity, and safety statistics. We randomize whether minibus owners have access to these monitoring data using a novel mobile app. This information allows owners in the treatment group to observe a more precise signal of driver effort, the amount of revenue drivers collected in fares, and the extent to which the driver engages in reckless driving. We find that treated vehicle owners modify the terms of the contract by decreasing the rental price they demand. Drivers respond by working more hours, decreasing behaviors that damage the vehicle, and under-reporting revenue by less. These changes improve firm profits and reduce management costs, thereby helping treated firms grow. The device also improves owners' trust in their drivers, which drivers say makes their job easier. Finally, we investigate whether these gains to the company come at the expense of passenger safety, in an environment where accidents are common. While we do not find any evidence that conditions deteriorate, offering detailed information on driving behavior also does not \emph{improve} safety. Only by incentivizing drivers through an additional cash treatment do we detect safety improvements. The secon

This dissertation combines three empirical studies aimed at addressing one of the developing world’s leading causes of death – exposure to household air pollution from using biomass as a cooking fuel –which is responsible for millions of premature deaths annually and contributes to global climate change. The first study tests the effects of a soft commitment device on eliminating biomass use among households in India who have access to a clean fuel, LPG. The second and third studies explore reducing biomass use through a fuel-efficient biomass cookstove among a population in Uganda who does not have access to clean fuels. The second study tests the effects of selling a fuel-efficient cookstove (at the market price) on biomass use. The third study focuses on the methodology behind measuring stove use by comparing four methods of measurement.The first chapter explores how a commitment mechanism may help households who use a mix of biomass and clean cooking fuels to fully transition to clean fuels. Most Indian households now own an LPG stove and one LPG cylinder. However, many households continue to regularly use indoor biomass-fueled mud stoves (i.e., chulhas) alongside LPG. Focusing on this population in rural Maharashtra, India, this study tests the effects of conditioning a sales offer for a spare LPG cylinder on a soft commitment device requiring initially disabling indoor chulhas. We find that almost all relevant households (>98%) were willing to accept the commitment device. Indoor chulha use decreased by 90% when the sales offer included the commitment device, compared to a 23% decrease without it. If the effects are persistent, this intervention may be one of the most cost-effective means to save lives among tens of millions of Indian households. Using WHO-CHOICE criteria and conservative assumptions, this intervention generates benefits roughly 20 times larger than the costs.The second chapter, co-authored with Theresa Beltramo, Garrick Blalock, David I. L

Collecting data to inform policy decisions is an ongoing global challenge. While some data collection has become routine, certain populations remain difficult to reach. From targeting social protection programs in densely-populated urban areas to reaching the ``last mile'' of infrastructure coverage, data collection and service delivery go hand-in-hand. Understanding the populations that live in urban communities as well as remote villages can help to tailor the design, targeting, and implementation of development programs. New sources of information have the potential to improve awareness of the needs and preferences of individuals, households, and communities.The goal of this dissertation is to provide multiple vantage points on the role that data, community input, and individual preferences can play in informing development policy. The empirical investigation presented in this dissertation covers two studies in Liberia and one in the Philippines. The unifying theme of the three chapters is the exploration of new sources of information about hard-to-reach populations.In the first chapter, I seek to describe and explain how community members would prefer to see a cash grant program targeted. Cash grant programs are widely popular. However, targeting of these, as well as other social protection programs in densely-populated urban areas, is a challenging undertaking. I take a first principal's approach to assessing individual preferences for targeting. I find that individuals express a clear preference for selecting community members that are similar to themselves. This holds true in the first stage of the study when I asked people to nominate knowledgeable community members to target a social protection program. It also holds true when I asked community members to target a cash grant. The presence of homophily, widely observed in social networks, is an important factor to consider when leveraging private information from individuals.In the second chapter, I present

This dissertation contains three empirical studies on the impact of three distinct government policies, ranging from the provision of agricultural insurance in Mexico to improved pollution controls on school buses in California. All three papers take advantage of administrative data from the respective programs and use selection on unobservables designs to obtain causal estimates for the impacts of these programs. Chapter 1 estimates the impact of an index- based agricultural insurance offered to small-holder farmers by the Mexican government on their income and consumption following a negative weather shock, as well as investment decisions for the subsequent growing season. Chapter 2 analyzes how the nutritional quality of the meals provided through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) affects students’ academic outcomes, as measured by standardized test scores. By studying the nutritional quality of these meals, as opposed to simply their availability, this analysis provides and important contribution to the body of literature on the educational benefits of the NSLP. In Chapter 3, I study the impact of the California Lower-Emission School Bus Program (LESBP), which seeks to lower the pollution emissions of school buses through replacements and retrofits, on students’ school attendance and standardized test scores.The first chapter of this dissertation, co-authored with Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet, examines the ex-post, shock-coping impact of weather index insurance from a pioneering, large-scale insurance program in Mexico to cover smallholder farmers as a social safety net. Exploiting insurance thresholds as a source of plausibly exogenous variation in insurance payments, we find evidence that these payments allow farmers to cultivate a larger land area in the growing season following a weather shock. Households in municipalities receiving payments also have larger per capita expenditures and income in the subsequent year. These results suggest tha

Chapter 1 explores the long-run effects of inequality within Brazil. I exploit variation in the climate to instrument for the local distribution of land in 1920 in a two-stage least squares instrumental variables framework. My instrument is an index quantifying the suitability of the climate for plantation versus smallholder agriculture. IV estimates show that higher levels of historical land inequality are associated with lower local public welfare spending, both historically (in 1923) and in recent times (from 1995-2005). Historical inequality is also associated with lower levels of development, as measured by the local Human Development Index. In Chapter 2 I show that the construction of Afghanistan’s largest modern infrastructure project, a two thousand mile highway known as the A1 or Ring Road, led to a surge in opium production within the country over the past decade. I first exploit spatial and temporal variation in district-level poppy cultivation and proximity to the road to show that districts with better access to the highway witnessed a significant increase in cultivation. I then utilize three rounds of the large-scale National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment Survey to show that improved access to the highway led Afghan farmers to substitute away from legal crops towards illicit opium production. In Chapter 3 I analyze local economic growth within Brazil over the 1920 to 1996 time period. I first find that local per capita economic growth displays unconditional divergence, in that localities which were relatively richer in 1920 grew faster over 20th century. Disaggregating local GDP into its agriculture, industry, and services components reveals long-run divergence to be present in all three sectors of the economy. After conditioning growth on a comprehensive set of controls, including those for geography, inequality, and human capital, I find no evidence that localities have converged in their long-run growth rates.

This dissertation contains three empirical studies on the impact of three distinct government policies, ranging from the provision of agricultural insurance in Mexico to improved pollution controls on school buses in California. All three papers take advantage of administrative data from the respective programs and use selection on unobservables designs to obtain causal estimates for the impacts of these programs. Chapter 1 estimates the impact of an index- based agricultural insurance offered to small-holder farmers by the Mexican government on their income and consumption following a negative weather shock, as well as investment decisions for the subsequent growing season. Chapter 2 analyzes how the nutritional quality of the meals provided through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) affects students’ academic outcomes, as measured by standardized test scores. By studying the nutritional quality of these meals, as opposed to simply their availability, this analysis provides and important contribution to the body of literature on the educational benefits of the NSLP. In Chapter 3, I study the impact of the California Lower-Emission School Bus Program (LESBP), which seeks to lower the pollution emissions of school buses through replacements and retrofits, on students’ school attendance and standardized test scores.The first chapter of this dissertation, co-authored with Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet, examines the ex-post, shock-coping impact of weather index insurance from a pioneering, large-scale insurance program in Mexico to cover smallholder farmers as a social safety net. Exploiting insurance thresholds as a source of plausibly exogenous variation in insurance payments, we find evidence that these payments allow farmers to cultivate a larger land area in the growing season following a weather shock. Households in municipalities receiving payments also have larger per capita expenditures and income in the subsequent year. These results suggest tha

Chapter 1 explores the long-run effects of inequality within Brazil. I exploit variation in the climate to instrument for the local distribution of land in 1920 in a two-stage least squares instrumental variables framework. My instrument is an index quantifying the suitability of the climate for plantation versus smallholder agriculture. IV estimates show that higher levels of historical land inequality are associated with lower local public welfare spending, both historically (in 1923) and in recent times (from 1995-2005). Historical inequality is also associated with lower levels of development, as measured by the local Human Development Index. In Chapter 2 I show that the construction of Afghanistan’s largest modern infrastructure project, a two thousand mile highway known as the A1 or Ring Road, led to a surge in opium production within the country over the past decade. I first exploit spatial and temporal variation in district-level poppy cultivation and proximity to the road to show that districts with better access to the highway witnessed a significant increase in cultivation. I then utilize three rounds of the large-scale National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment Survey to show that improved access to the highway led Afghan farmers to substitute away from legal crops towards illicit opium production. In Chapter 3 I analyze local economic growth within Brazil over the 1920 to 1996 time period. I first find that local per capita economic growth displays unconditional divergence, in that localities which were relatively richer in 1920 grew faster over 20th century. Disaggregating local GDP into its agriculture, industry, and services components reveals long-run divergence to be present in all three sectors of the economy. After conditioning growth on a comprehensive set of controls, including those for geography, inequality, and human capital, I find no evidence that localities have converged in their long-run growth rates.

As demand for electricity grows around the world, so does the need for rigorous evaluation of energy policy interventions. In this dissertation, I use large datasets and modern econometric methods to study two such policies at scale - rural electrification in India and energy efficiency subsidies in California. I find that the benefits associated with these interventions are substantially smaller than previously thought, highlighting the importance of using new techniques for causal inference in these settings. In Chapter 1, I study the impacts of grid-scale rural electrification in India, using a regression discontinuity framework. In Chapter 2, I evaluate energy efficiency upgrades in K-12 schools in California using high-frequency data and novel machine learning methods. In Chapter 3, I develop methods to guide experimental design in the presence of panel data.In the first chapter, coauthored with Louis Preonas, we study the impacts of energy access in the developing world. Over 1 billion people still lack electricity access. Developing countries are investing billions of dollars in rural electrification, targeting economic growth and poverty reduction, despite limited empirical evidence. We estimate the effects of rural electrification on economic development in the context of India's national electrification program, which reached over 400,000 villages. We use a regression discontinuity design and high-resolution geospatial data to identify medium-run economic impacts of electrification. We find a substantial increase in electricity use, but reject effects larger than 0.26 standard deviations across numerous measures of economic development, suggesting that rural electrification may be less beneficial than previously thought.In the second chapter, coauthored with Christopher R. Knittel, David Rapson, Mar Reguant, and Catherine Wolfram, we study the impacts of energy efficiency investments at public K-12 schools in California. We leverage high frequency data

The relationship between democracy and inequality and the role of democratic participation in fostering redistribution has been a critical question of interest to economists over time. My dissertation focuses on a key aspect of democratic participation - the ability of citizens to form political parties and contest elections - and empirically identifies the relationship between the distribution of political power, and the distribution of public resources. To this effect, I study the economic impacts emanating from the political mobilization of historically underprivileged and socio-economically disadvantaged citizen groups in India - the low caste and indigenous communities - which has occurred over the past three decades. While comprising over half the nation's population, citizens from these groups have faced institutionalized discrimination through the hierarchical caste system, severely restricting their access to education, public institutions and basic services. This process of political mobilization by low caste citizens resulted in the formation of powerful caste-based political parties which contested elections in an attempt to capture political power through the democratic process, and subsequently, use their nascent state power to redirect public resources to their communities. The core chapters of this dissertation empirically document the economic and social impacts emanating from this change in the distribution of political power through democratic processes, resulting in the political empowerment of marginalized citizen groups. The first chapter of my dissertation identifies the economic impacts of this process of political mobilization. Using the outcome of close elections between parties exclusively representing low caste interests and other mainstream parties as the source of exogenous variation, the paper shows that the marginal legislator from low caste parties increases the share of state expenditures allocated towards targeted and untargeted we

As demand for electricity grows around the world, so does the need for rigorous evaluation of energy policy interventions. In this dissertation, I use large datasets and modern econometric methods to study two such policies at scale - rural electrification in India and energy efficiency subsidies in California. I find that the benefits associated with these interventions are substantially smaller than previously thought, highlighting the importance of using new techniques for causal inference in these settings. In Chapter 1, I study the impacts of grid-scale rural electrification in India, using a regression discontinuity framework. In Chapter 2, I evaluate energy efficiency upgrades in K-12 schools in California using high-frequency data and novel machine learning methods. In Chapter 3, I develop methods to guide experimental design in the presence of panel data.In the first chapter, coauthored with Louis Preonas, we study the impacts of energy access in the developing world. Over 1 billion people still lack electricity access. Developing countries are investing billions of dollars in rural electrification, targeting economic growth and poverty reduction, despite limited empirical evidence. We estimate the effects of rural electrification on economic development in the context of India's national electrification program, which reached over 400,000 villages. We use a regression discontinuity design and high-resolution geospatial data to identify medium-run economic impacts of electrification. We find a substantial increase in electricity use, but reject effects larger than 0.26 standard deviations across numerous measures of economic development, suggesting that rural electrification may be less beneficial than previously thought.In the second chapter, coauthored with Christopher R. Knittel, David Rapson, Mar Reguant, and Catherine Wolfram, we study the impacts of energy efficiency investments at public K-12 schools in California. We leverage high frequency data

The relationship between democracy and inequality and the role of democratic participation in fostering redistribution has been a critical question of interest to economists over time. My dissertation focuses on a key aspect of democratic participation - the ability of citizens to form political parties and contest elections - and empirically identifies the relationship between the distribution of political power, and the distribution of public resources. To this effect, I study the economic impacts emanating from the political mobilization of historically underprivileged and socio-economically disadvantaged citizen groups in India - the low caste and indigenous communities - which has occurred over the past three decades. While comprising over half the nation's population, citizens from these groups have faced institutionalized discrimination through the hierarchical caste system, severely restricting their access to education, public institutions and basic services. This process of political mobilization by low caste citizens resulted in the formation of powerful caste-based political parties which contested elections in an attempt to capture political power through the democratic process, and subsequently, use their nascent state power to redirect public resources to their communities. The core chapters of this dissertation empirically document the economic and social impacts emanating from this change in the distribution of political power through democratic processes, resulting in the political empowerment of marginalized citizen groups. The first chapter of my dissertation identifies the economic impacts of this process of political mobilization. Using the outcome of close elections between parties exclusively representing low caste interests and other mainstream parties as the source of exogenous variation, the paper shows that the marginal legislator from low caste parties increases the share of state expenditures allocated towards targeted and untargeted we

This dissertation investigates how policies and regulation can impact both firm and worker behavior in the illegal black market for commercial sex.In the first chapter, "Optimal regulation of illegal goods: the case of massage licensing and commercial sex," I analyze how regulating barriers to entry can alter market structure and risk-taking behavior in the black market for commercial sex, and consequently impact associated health and crime externalities. Despite its illegality, prostitution is a multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S. A growing share of this black market operates covertly behind massage parlor fronts. I examine how changes to licensing in the legal market for massage parlors can impact the total size and risk composition of the black market for prostitution, which operates either illegally through escorts or quasi-legally in massage parlors. I find that lower barriers to entry for massage parlors makes the black market for prostitution larger, but also less risky. Consequently, the incidence of gonorrhea and rape falls in the general and sex worker populations, and the incidence of chlamydia falls in the predominant sex worker demographic.In the second chapter, "Product differentiation by legal status: estimating the demand for commercial sex," I model the quasi-legal and illegal sectors of prostitution as a differentiated product demand system. I use a Logit model and online review data from California to estimate the own-price and cross-price elasticities of demand for quasi-legal and illegal prostitution. I instrument for prices using two marginal cost variables -- massage licensing fees, and the interaction between fees and the adult Asian population. I find that demand for quasi-legal prostitution is highly elastic and weakly substitutable with illegal prostitution.In the third chapter, "Reducing the risk premium for unprotected sex through community-based HIV prevention: evidence from India and Ecuador," I further examine the risk behavior

This dissertation combines three empirical studies of household behaviors as they relate to investment in health and human capital in developing countries. The first explores how changes in children's nutrition in Uganda correspond to composition of a household's income. The second studies measurement activities in a cookstove intervention in Darfur, Sudan, with insights into what may be missed in traditional evaluation approaches as well as how technology adoption may benefit from an unintended “nudge.” The third evaluates the impacts of a conditional cash transfer program in El Salvador, with a focus on how program compliance and benefits change time allocations among household members. Chapter 1 explores the relationship between a household's income source (e.g. wage vs. farm) and children's nutrition in Uganda, in a joint work with Talip Kilic and Calogero Carletto. The analysis uses the three annual waves of the Uganda National Panel Survey and features a series of panel regressions for child height-for-age z-scores (HAZ) under age 5. We control for time-invariant child-level heterogeneity and other time-variant observable characteristics using fixed effects. The analysis finds no impact of short-term changes in total gross income on height scores overall. Sector-differentiated analyses indicate that compared to wage earnings, only the share of income originating from non-farm self-employment exerts positive effects on HAZ, while agriculture is more negative. Within agriculture, the income shares from (i) household's consumption of own crop production and (ii) low-protein crop production appear to underlie a negative effect seen from the share of income originating from crop production. We see that results are driven by the older and poorer cohorts, whose diets may be more influenced by shifts in income and production. Overall, any effects are small, given that coefficients represent a change from 100 percent wage income to 100 percent of the other source in a

This dissertation combines three empirical studies of household behaviors as they relate to investment in health and human capital in developing countries. The first explores how changes in children's nutrition in Uganda correspond to composition of a household's income. The second studies measurement activities in a cookstove intervention in Darfur, Sudan, with insights into what may be missed in traditional evaluation approaches as well as how technology adoption may benefit from an unintended “nudge.” The third evaluates the impacts of a conditional cash transfer program in El Salvador, with a focus on how program compliance and benefits change time allocations among household members. Chapter 1 explores the relationship between a household's income source (e.g. wage vs. farm) and children's nutrition in Uganda, in a joint work with Talip Kilic and Calogero Carletto. The analysis uses the three annual waves of the Uganda National Panel Survey and features a series of panel regressions for child height-for-age z-scores (HAZ) under age 5. We control for time-invariant child-level heterogeneity and other time-variant observable characteristics using fixed effects. The analysis finds no impact of short-term changes in total gross income on height scores overall. Sector-differentiated analyses indicate that compared to wage earnings, only the share of income originating from non-farm self-employment exerts positive effects on HAZ, while agriculture is more negative. Within agriculture, the income shares from (i) household's consumption of own crop production and (ii) low-protein crop production appear to underlie a negative effect seen from the share of income originating from crop production. We see that results are driven by the older and poorer cohorts, whose diets may be more influenced by shifts in income and production. Overall, any effects are small, given that coefficients represent a change from 100 percent wage income to 100 percent of the other source in a

This dissertation investigates how policies and regulation can impact both firm and worker behavior in the illegal black market for commercial sex.In the first chapter, "Optimal regulation of illegal goods: the case of massage licensing and commercial sex," I analyze how regulating barriers to entry can alter market structure and risk-taking behavior in the black market for commercial sex, and consequently impact associated health and crime externalities. Despite its illegality, prostitution is a multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S. A growing share of this black market operates covertly behind massage parlor fronts. I examine how changes to licensing in the legal market for massage parlors can impact the total size and risk composition of the black market for prostitution, which operates either illegally through escorts or quasi-legally in massage parlors. I find that lower barriers to entry for massage parlors makes the black market for prostitution larger, but also less risky. Consequently, the incidence of gonorrhea and rape falls in the general and sex worker populations, and the incidence of chlamydia falls in the predominant sex worker demographic.In the second chapter, "Product differentiation by legal status: estimating the demand for commercial sex," I model the quasi-legal and illegal sectors of prostitution as a differentiated product demand system. I use a Logit model and online review data from California to estimate the own-price and cross-price elasticities of demand for quasi-legal and illegal prostitution. I instrument for prices using two marginal cost variables -- massage licensing fees, and the interaction between fees and the adult Asian population. I find that demand for quasi-legal prostitution is highly elastic and weakly substitutable with illegal prostitution.In the third chapter, "Reducing the risk premium for unprotected sex through community-based HIV prevention: evidence from India and Ecuador," I further examine the risk behavior

I study the political effects of resource booms on the behavior of politicians, citizens and government and discuss why the existing literature provide unsatisfactory answers to understand the complex nature of resource booms. In the first chapter, I explore how resource booms affect the incentives of politicians and how this is related to the contested issue of the impact of natural resources on living standards. Then, in the second chapter, I analyze how resource booms can affect the citizens’ beliefs about the performance of democracy and its implications in terms of quality of the democratic regime. Finally, in the third chapter, I study how resource booms affect the performance of local government in terms of delivering public goods in an efficient manner. Together, these chapters offer a complete understanding of some of the most relevant issues highlighted by the theoretical and empirical literatures of the so-called resource curse. Are resource booms beneficial or detrimental for citizens? What is the role of politicians’ incentives in this regard? In the first chapter “The Political Effects of Resource Booms: Political Outcomes, Clientelism and Public Goods Provision in Peru” I exploit variation in natural resource rents and mineral production among Peruvian municipalities to analyze the impact of resource booms on local politicians’ behavior and citizens’ well-being. Although this topic has recently attracted the attention of several scholars, the existing empirical evidence remains inconclusive regarding whether resource booms are beneficial or detrimental to citizens via their effects on public good provision and welfare outcomes. I argue that, despite the fact that many of the existing theoretical models allow for the possibility of non-monotonic responses, the empirical literature has mostly approached this phenomena using linear models, failing to correctly understand the nature of resource booms. Exploiting the recent extraordinary increase in minera

This paper examines whether differences in individual risk attitudes are related to interpersonal conflict. In more than thirty villages of rural Uganda, we conduct a social survey to document social links between pairs of individuals within a village, and separately elicit individual risk attitudes using an incentivized task. Our findings reveal that the difference in risk attitudes between two individuals is significantly and positively related to the presence of interpersonal conflict between them. This relationship is particularly strong among kin. By contrast, the strength of risk aversion per se is not related to conflict. Further, we conduct simulations that suggest that the relationship cannot be solely explained by diverging attitudes after the severing of social ties as a result of interpersonal conflict.

This paper examines whether differences in individual risk attitudes are related to interpersonal conflict. In more than thirty villages of rural Uganda, we conduct a social survey to document social links between pairs of individuals within a village, and separately elicit individual risk attitudes using an incentivized task. Our findings reveal that the difference in risk attitudes between two individuals is significantly and positively related to the presence of interpersonal conflict between them. This relationship is particularly strong among kin. By contrast, the strength of risk aversion per se is not related to conflict. Further, we conduct simulations that suggest that the relationship cannot be solely explained by diverging attitudes after the severing of social ties as a result of interpersonal conflict.

I study the political effects of resource booms on the behavior of politicians, citizens and government and discuss why the existing literature provide unsatisfactory answers to understand the complex nature of resource booms. In the first chapter, I explore how resource booms affect the incentives of politicians and how this is related to the contested issue of the impact of natural resources on living standards. Then, in the second chapter, I analyze how resource booms can affect the citizens’ beliefs about the performance of democracy and its implications in terms of quality of the democratic regime. Finally, in the third chapter, I study how resource booms affect the performance of local government in terms of delivering public goods in an efficient manner. Together, these chapters offer a complete understanding of some of the most relevant issues highlighted by the theoretical and empirical literatures of the so-called resource curse. Are resource booms beneficial or detrimental for citizens? What is the role of politicians’ incentives in this regard? In the first chapter “The Political Effects of Resource Booms: Political Outcomes, Clientelism and Public Goods Provision in Peru” I exploit variation in natural resource rents and mineral production among Peruvian municipalities to analyze the impact of resource booms on local politicians’ behavior and citizens’ well-being. Although this topic has recently attracted the attention of several scholars, the existing empirical evidence remains inconclusive regarding whether resource booms are beneficial or detrimental to citizens via their effects on public good provision and welfare outcomes. I argue that, despite the fact that many of the existing theoretical models allow for the possibility of non-monotonic responses, the empirical literature has mostly approached this phenomena using linear models, failing to correctly understand the nature of resource booms. Exploiting the recent extraordinary increase in minera

As mobile phones reach the remote corners of the world, they bring with them a sense of great optimism. Hailed as a technology that "can transform the lives of the people who are able to access them," mobile phones have the potential to play a positive role in the lives of many of the world's poor. Such claims are often reported alongside striking statistics on the uptake of mobile phones in the developing world. Already, over two thirds of the world's mobile phones are in developing countries. In Nigeria, new subscribers are signing up for mobile phone services at a rate of almost one every second, and Nokia estimates that by the end of 2012 over 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa will have mobile coverage.This dissertation presents an empirical investigation of the role of mobile phones in Rwandan society and economy. The material draws on two summers of field work in sub-Saharan Africa, several thousand interviews with mobile phone owners, and roughly ten terabytes of data on mobile phone use that I obtained from Rwanda's largest telecommunications operator. In the first chapter, I analyze the distribution of mobile technology within the Rwandan population, drawing attention to disparities in access to and use of mobile phones between rich and poor, and between men and women. The analysis highlights three sets of results. First, comparing the population of mobile phone owners to the general Rwandan population, I find that phone owners are considerably wealthier, better educated, and more predominantly male. Second, based on self-reported data, I observe statistically significant differences between genders in phone access and use; for instance, women are more likely to use shared phones than men. Finally, analyzing the complete call records of each subscriber, I note large disparities in patterns of phone use and in the structure of social networks by socioeconomic status. The second chapter focuses on the economic implications of the spread of an early form of "mo

As mobile phones reach the remote corners of the world, they bring with them a sense of great optimism. Hailed as a technology that "can transform the lives of the people who are able to access them," mobile phones have the potential to play a positive role in the lives of many of the world's poor. Such claims are often reported alongside striking statistics on the uptake of mobile phones in the developing world. Already, over two thirds of the world's mobile phones are in developing countries. In Nigeria, new subscribers are signing up for mobile phone services at a rate of almost one every second, and Nokia estimates that by the end of 2012 over 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa will have mobile coverage.This dissertation presents an empirical investigation of the role of mobile phones in Rwandan society and economy. The material draws on two summers of field work in sub-Saharan Africa, several thousand interviews with mobile phone owners, and roughly ten terabytes of data on mobile phone use that I obtained from Rwanda's largest telecommunications operator. In the first chapter, I analyze the distribution of mobile technology within the Rwandan population, drawing attention to disparities in access to and use of mobile phones between rich and poor, and between men and women. The analysis highlights three sets of results. First, comparing the population of mobile phone owners to the general Rwandan population, I find that phone owners are considerably wealthier, better educated, and more predominantly male. Second, based on self-reported data, I observe statistically significant differences between genders in phone access and use; for instance, women are more likely to use shared phones than men. Finally, analyzing the complete call records of each subscriber, I note large disparities in patterns of phone use and in the structure of social networks by socioeconomic status. The second chapter focuses on the economic implications of the spread of an early form of "mo

In this paper we explore lessons from the global liquidity crisis pertaining to the prudential supervision role of central bank in an open economy. The crisis validates the need for external debt management policy in emerging markets. Hoarding international reserves (IR) is a potent self-insurance mechanism. However, it is associated with relatively high costs and is also less efficient in absence of assertive external debt management policies. In the presence of congestion externalities associated with deleveraging, optimal external borrowing-tax-cum-IR-hoarding-subsidy reduces the cost as well as the scale of hoarding IR.

In this paper we explore lessons from the global liquidity crisis pertaining to the prudential supervision role of central bank in an open economy. The crisis validates the need for external debt management policy in emerging markets. Hoarding international reserves (IR) is a potent self-insurance mechanism. However, it is associated with relatively high costs and is also less efficient in absence of assertive external debt management policies. In the presence of congestion externalities associated with deleveraging, optimal external borrowing-tax-cum-IR-hoarding-subsidy reduces the cost as well as the scale of hoarding IR.