International investment agreements in bilateral treaties or free trade agreements allow investors to bring compensation claims when their investments are hurt by new regulations addressing environmental or other social concerns. Compensation rules such as expropriation clauses in international...

In 2009 the Australian government delivered approximately $8 billion in direct payments to households. These payments were preannounced and randomly allocated to households based on postal codes over a 5-week period. We exploit this random allocation to estimate the causal response of...