Many ethnically diverse countries have policies that encourage integration across ethnic groups. This dissertation investigates the impact and welfare implications of a residential desegregation policy in Singapore, the ethnic housing quotas. I employ both reduced form and structural form...

We study the role of Dutch colonial institutions on urban development for the megacity of Jakarta, Indonesia. Using historical maps of Dutch settlements and a rich granular database, we implement a boundary discontinuity design comparing locations within 200 meters of Dutch boundaries. We find...

Desegregation is a key policy issue in many countries. I investigate a residential desegregation program in Singapore - the ethnic housing quotas. I show that choice restrictions imposed on apartment blocks above the quota limits (constrained) could have distortionary effects, causing price and...

The two primary approaches to estimate marginal willingness-to-pay (MWTP) for differentiated goods are hedonics (Rosen, 1974) and discrete choice models (McFadden, 1974). Researchers have alluded to a duality between both models. The innovation in this paper is to show that the hedonic MWTP can...

Food programs are large and expensive components of social safety nets in developing countries. For agricultural households, hunger is more acute in annual lean seasons, but food policies typically do not adapt to seasonality. There is limited research on this because of a paucity of panel data...

Targeted cash transfer programs have been an important policy tool in developing countries. This paper considers (i) how the timing of transfers affects household expenditure and labor supply responses, and (ii) how household expectations shape our interpretation of those responses. We study...

Prior to the Asian financial crisis, social protection in Indonesia was largely based on informal arrangements. When the country sank into a deep social and economic crisis in 1998, the government had no alternative but to create new, more formal social safety nets explicitly aimed at helping...

Centralised targeting registries are increasingly used to allocate social assistance benefits in developing countries. This paper provides the first attempt to identify the relative importance of two key design issues for targeting accuracy: (1) which households to survey for inclusion in the...