We investigate the heterogeneity of the impact of World Bank foreign aid projects on local economic development across countries, sectors and time. Using a grid-cell dataset of geo-referenced aid data, satellite night-time light imagery, and climatic and socio-economic controls, we employ a...

The Paris Agreement on Climate Change requests signatory countries to specify voluntary caps on their greenhouse gas emissions. The caps stated by the end of 2021 imply percentage emission reductions that vary widely across countries. This paper uses globally representative data from the Global...

While Tanzania's greenhouse gas emission levels still seem low by international comparison, the country is rapidly carbonizing, and most households still rely on kerosene, charcoal, and firewood for cooking and lighting. Carbon pricing can be an effective tool to discourage the creation of high...

The age at which women become mothers for the first time is ever increasing in many industrialized countries. Therefore, fertility determinants that might deteriorate with age, such as health, and their effect on reproductive patterns, should be given more attention. We explore the effect of the...

Easterlin and O'Connor (PNAS 2022) have investigated which economic, social, political, and ecological factors explain long-run (36-year) changes in European countries' happiness (life satisfaction). Considering six potential predictors advanced in the pertinent literature, they found only...

Our paper documents the importance of workers' ex-ante heterogeneity for labor market dynamics and for the composition of the unemployment pool. We show that workers with high wages have both lower separation rates and larger log-deviations of these separations over the business cycle than those...

While Tanzania's greenhouse gas emission levels still seem low by international comparison, the country is rapidly carbonizing, and most households still rely on kerosene, charcoal, and firewood for cooking and lighting. Carbon pricing can be an effective tool to discourage the creation of high...

This paper shows that less generous unemployment benefits in one country may generate substantial negative long-run consumption spillovers to non-reforming countries under incomplete consumption insurance. While lower benefits reduce unemployment in the reforming country, employed workers...

Resilience is the ability of an entity to manage a destabilizing shock or rise in pressure. The recently published State Resilience Index (SRI) includes ecological resilience along with several other "pillars" of state resilience. Given that indicators of subjective well-being (SWB) are...