The 2007-2008 upsurge in agricultural commodity prices gave rise to widespread concern about investors causing a "global land rush". Large land deals can provide opportunities for better access to capital, transfer of technology, and advances in productivity and employment generation. But they...

The barriers faced by Chinese rural-urban migrants to access social services, particularly education, in host cities could help explain why the majority of them choose to leave their children behind. We identified the causal impacts of school fees by instrumenting for it with unexpected shocks...

This paper reviews the emerging big data literature applied to urban transportation issues from the perspective of economic research. It provides a typology of big data sources relevant to transportation analyses and describes how these data can be used to measure mobility, associated...

The paper studies the market failures associated with land tenure insecurity and information asymmetry in an urban land use model, and analyzes households' responses to mitigate tenure insecurity. When buyers and sellers of land plots can pair along trusted kinship lines whereby deception (the...

This paper is the first to provide both theoretical and empirical evidence of farmland globalization whereby international investors directly acquire large tracts of agricultural land in other countries. A theoretical framework explains the geography of farmland acquisitions as a function of...

This paper proposes a theory of urban land use with endogenous property rights. Socially heterogeneous households compete for where to live in the city and choose the type of property rights they purchase from a land administration which collects fees in inequitable ways. The model generates...

This paper explores the incentives for backyarding, an expanding category of urban land-use in developing countries that has proliferated South Africa. The theoretical model exposes the trade-off faced by the homeowner in deciding how much backyard land to rent out: loss of yard space...

This paper combines local election results and geo-referenced road construction data over 1993-2012 to investigate political bias in road infrastructure investment in a democratic setting, focusing on the case of Mexico. Using a regression discontinuity design, the paper finds strong evidence of...

The migration of labor from rural to urban areas is an important part of the urbanization process in developing countries. Even though it has been the focus of abundant research over the past five decades, some key policy questions have not found clear answers yet. To what extent is internal...

The World Bank Group's Horn of Africa Regional Initiative promotes resilience and economic opportunity in one of the world’s most challenging regions for security and development. Within the region, extreme poverty, vulnerability, fragility, and food insecurity are disproportionately...