This paper argues that openness to new, unconventional and disruptive ideas has a first-order impact on creative innovations — innovations that break new ground in terms of knowledge creation. After presenting a motivating model focusing on the choice between incremental and radical...

While many developing country policymakers see heavy fertilizer subsidies as critical to raising agricultural productivity, most economists see them as distortionary, regressive, environmentally unsound, and argue that they result in politicized, inefficient distribution of fertilizer supply. We...

This paper studies the conditions under which the scarcity of a factor (in particular, labor) encourages technological progress and technology adoption. In standard endogenous growth models, which feature a strong scale effect, an increase in the supply of labor encourages technological...

This paper reports the results from a randomized evaluation of a microcredit program introduced in rural areas of Morocco starting in 2006 by Al Amana, the country's largest microfinance institution. Al Amana was the only MFI operating in the study areas during the evaluation period. Thirteen...

This empirical paper examines the question of whether movements in housing sales predict subsequent movement in house prices - or the converse. The former (positive) relationship is well hypothesized by several frictional search models of housing market transactions or quot;churnquot;. The...

Using the most comprehensive developing country dataset ever compiled on air and water pollution and environmental regulations, the paper assesses India’s environmental regulations with a difference-in-differences design. The air pollution regulations are associated with substantial...

This paper proposes a tractable model to study the equilibrium diversity of technological progress and shows that equilibrium technological progress may exhibit too little diversity (too much conformity), in particular foregoing socially beneficial investments in “alternative” technologies...

We study the demand for household water connections in urban Morocco, and the effect of such connections on household welfare. In the northern city of Tangiers, among homeowners without a private connection to the city’s water grid, a random subset was offered a simplified procedure to...

The United States Government recently concluded a year-long process to develop a range of values representing the monetized damages associated with an incremental increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, commonly referred to as the social cost of carbon (SCC). These values are currently used...

We are the first to examine the effect of Superfund cleanups on infant health rather than focusing on proximity to a site. We study singleton births to mothers residing within 5km of a Superfund site between 1989 and 2003 in five large states. Our “difference in differences” approach...