This paper evaluates the impact of access to groundwater on poverty using data from rural India. The estimation exploits the fact that the technology required to access groundwater changes exogenously due to constraints imposed by laws of physics at a depth of eight meters. I find that rural...

Conditional on enrollment, African American students are substantially less likely to graduate from four-year public universities than white students. Using administrative micro-data from Missouri, we decompose the graduation gap into racial differences in four factors: (i) how students sort to...

This paper uses an original dataset covering the presence of local news in medium-large Italian cities in the period 1993–2010 to evaluate the effects of newspaper entry and exit on electoral participation, political selection, and government efficiency. Exploiting discrete changes in the...

This paper uses a new dataset on child-adoption matching to estimate the preferences of potential adoptive parents over US-born and unborn children relinquished for adoption. We identify significant preferences favoring girls and against African American children put up for adoption. These...

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, millions of German expellees were resettled into the new borders of Germany, but not into the parts of Germany that were occupied by France. Using a spatial regression discontinuity framework, I estimate the persistence of the population shock over a...

One of the most consistent findings in the literature on teacher quality is that teachers improve with experience, especially in the first several years. This study extends this research by separately identifying the benefits of general teaching experience and specific curriculum familiarity. I...

Education ministries worldwide have promoted community engagement through school committees. This paper presents results from a large field experiment testing alternative approaches to strengthen school committees in public schools in Indonesia. Two novel treatments focus on institutional...

Welfare programs are often implemented in-kind to promote outcomes that might not be realized under cash transfers. This paper tests whether such paternalistically motivated transfers are justified compared to cash, using a randomized controlled trial of Mexico's food assistance program. In...

We use an original panel dataset of migrant departures from the Philippines to identify the responsiveness of migrant numbers and wages to GDP shocks in destination countries. We find a large, significant response of migrant numbers to GDP shocks at destination, but no significant wage response....

This paper measures the demand for adult medical male circumcision using an experiment that randomly offered varying-priced subsidies and comprehensive information to 1,600 uncircumcised men in urban Malawi. We find low demand for male circumcision: only 3 percent are circumcised over a three...