Over the last few years, colonialism, especially as pursued by Europeans, has enjoyed a revival in interest among both scholars and the general public. Although a number of new accounts cast colonial empires in a more favorable light than has generally been customary, others contend that...

While substantial progress has been made in combating malnutrition at a global level, chronic maternal and child malnutrition remains a serious problem in many parts of the developing world. In this paper, using a randomized control trial design in Nepal, we evaluate a program that provided...

The paper provides the first assessment of: (i) America's progress in lifting the lower bound—the floor—of the distribution of real income; (ii) whether the country's largest antipoverty program, SNAP (“food stamps”), helped do so. An operational method of estimating the floor is...

This paper studies the long-run effects of a "big-push" program providing a large asset transfer to the poorest Indian households. In a randomized controlled trial that follows these households over 10 years, we find positive effects on consumption (0.6 SD), food security (0.1 SD), income (0.3...

How do climate risk beliefs affect coastal housing markets? This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence. First, we build a dynamic housing market model and show that belief heterogeneity can reconcile the mixed empirical evidence on flood risk capitalization into housing prices....

Sea-level rise and ensuing permanent coastal inundation will cause spatial shifts in population and economic activity over the next 200 years. Using a highly spatially disaggregated, dynamic model of the world economy that accounts for the dynamics of migration, trade, and innovation, this paper...