This article empirically examines the causal effect of railway infrastructure on local economic development using the construction of Qingzang railway as a natural experiment. We apply the difference-in-difference method and find that the Qingzang railway significantly stimulated the economy of...

I exploit the unexpected increase in employment in 1975, 1976, and 1977 in the South African homelands to compare the long-term adult outcomes of children whose fathers benefited from the employment increase to those who did not. Using a standard difference-in-difference approach, I find that...

This article analyzes whether children born to teen mothers in Cape Town, South Africa, are disadvantaged in terms of their health outcomes because their mother is a teen. Exploiting the longitudinal nature of the Cape Area Panel Study, we assess whether observable differences between teen...

There is considerable debate about whether social protection programs providing transfers to households create disincentives for labor supply, but little attention is paid to the effect of programs on other forms of labor reallocation. This article estimates the impact of Brazil’s Bolsa...

This article empirically investigates whether there are differences in a region’s taxation burden on the basis of support for the centralized state government in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Using randomness introduced by close election outcomes, this article finds that the government...

This article assesses the importance of social interactions in determining an individual’s choice to connect to an electrical grid, using an original data set on a new rural electrification program in Ethiopia. Combining global positioning system information with random allocation of discount...