Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become increasingly popular as a development strategy. These programs aim to reduce poverty or achieve other social goals by making the transfers conditional upon the receivers' actions. Conditions are designed to encourage some desirable behavior...

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs aim to reduce poverty or achieve other social goals by making the transfers conditional upon the receivers' actions. Conditions are designed to encourage some desirable behavior that recipients might otherwise under-invest in. An unintended consequence of...

Hunger during pre-harvest lean seasons is widespread in the agrarian areas of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. We randomly assign an $8.50 incentive to households in rural Bangladesh to out-migrate during the lean season. The incentive induces 22% of households to send a seasonal migrant, their...

When agricultural productivity improves, farmers may react by expanding farming and further encroach on forest lands, or they may choose to intensify and produce more output with less land. We specify the conditions under which agricultural productivity can have such ambiguous effects on...

About 11% of the Chinese population are rural-urban migrants, and the vast majority of them (124 million people) possess a rural hukou which severely restrict their children's access to urban public schools. As a result, 61 million children are left behind in rural areas. We use a...

This paper studies the response of agricultural production to rural labor loss during the process of urbanization. Using household microdata from India and exogenous variation in migration induced by urban income shocks interacted with distance to cities, we document sharp declines in crop...

While the United Nations describes Myanmar's oppression of the Rohingya as "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing" (UN, 2017), the state maintains that the violence was idiosyncratic and not motivated by anti-Rohingya animus. We assemble existing and original large-sample data to evaluate these...

We propose a theory-inspired measure of the accessibility of a city's center: the size of the surrounding area from which it can be reached within a specific time. Using publicly-available optimal routing software, we compute these "accessibility zones" for the 109 largest American and European...

Disagreements over business deals, land boundaries, or loan non-repayment are very common sources of disputes, and courts are congested in developing countries. We evaluate the effects of the government introducing formal "village courts" (VCs) in rural Bangladesh using a randomized controlled...

We provide experimental evidence on the effects of vocational and entrepreneurial training for Malawian youth, in an environment where access to schooling and formal sector employment is extremely low. We track a large fraction of program drop-outs - a common phenomenon in the training...