The literature on aid and growth has not found a convincing instrumental variable to identify the causal effects of aid. This paper exploits an instrumental variable based on the fact that since 1987, eligibility for aid from the International Development Association (IDA) has been based partly...

This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown on criminal activity in the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina. We find a large, significant, robust, and immediate decline in crime following quarantine restrictions. We observe the effect on property crime reported...

An important challenge in the crime literature is to isolate significant causal effects of police on crime. Following a terrorist attack on the main Jewish center in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 1994, all Jewish and Muslim institutions (including schools, synagogues, mosques,...

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 Manu- factures and a market-access approach, we exploit the plausibly exogenous nature of this historical...