This paper examines the influence of transportation infrastructure on migration decisions in the context of the Great Migration in the United States. Focusing on the opening of the Panama Canal in 1920, we isolate the effect of improved economic opportunities from reduced migration costs. Using...

We review, from a practical standpoint, the evolving literature on assessing external validity (EV) of estimated treatment effects. We provide an implementation and real-world assessment of the general EV measures developed in Bo and Galiani (2021). In the context of estimating conditional...

We study the impact of the Panama Canal on the development of Canada's manufacturing sector in the years from 1900 to 1939. Using newly digitized county-level data from the Census of Manufactures and a market-access approach, we exploit the plausibly exogenous nature of this historical episode...

We examine the role of trust in financial institutions as a necessary condition for the wider use of formal financial services by the poor. We randomly assigned beneficiaries of a conditional cash transfer program in 130 villages in Peru to attend a 3.5 hour training session designed to build...

Strategies based on growth and inequality reduction require a long-run horizon, and this paper therefore argues that those strategies need to be complemented by poverty alleviation programs. With regards to such programs, informality in Latin America and the Caribbean is a primary obstacle to...

In designing any causal study, steps must be taken to address both internal and external threats to its validity. Researchers tend to focus primarily on dealing with threats to internal validity. However, once they have conducted an internally valid analysis, that analysis yields an established...

In the past 40 years, a large number of children have been abandoned by their families or have been abducted in China. We argue that the implementation of the one-child policy has significantly increased both child abandonment and child abduction and that, furthermore, the cultural preference...

We discuss the past, present and future of the structural approach in empirical microeconomics, starting with its inception in the 1970s and 1980s. Our focus is on the use of the structural approach in labor economics, broadly defined to include population economics, human capital and related...

The Inca Empire was the last of a long series of highly developed cultures in pre-colonial South America. It stretched across parts of the current territories of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and the whole of Peru. The Inca Road was its 30,000-kilometer-long transportation system....

We develop a simple (incumbent versus entrant) strategic deterrence model to study the economic and geopolitical interactions underlying international trade-related infrastructure projects such as the Panama Canal. We study the incentives for global geopolitical players to support allied...