Fire has long served as a tool in agriculture, but this practice's human capital consequences have proved difficult to study. Drawing on data from satellites, air monitors, and vital records, we study how smoke from sugarcane harvest fires affects infant health in the Brazilian state that...

This paper leverages quasi-experimental variation in increased access to basic formal education, introduced by a large-scale school construction program in Indonesia in the 1970s, to quantify the benefits to the children of women targeted by the program. Novel and rich data allow the analysis of...

We investigate the assimilation of immigrant youth in Ecuador. Focusing on formal schooling and employing administrative data from high schools, we document subtle ways by which assessment biases against students with an immigrant background play a significant role in this assimilation process....

In this paper we estimate the short-run elasticity of substitution between male and female workers, using data on employment and wages from Italian provinces from 1993-2006. We adopt a production function approach similar to that of Card and Lemieux (2001a) and Acemoglu, Autor and Lyle (2004)....

Firm informality is pervasive throughout the developing world, Bangladesh being no exception. The informal status of many firms substantially reduces the tax basis and therefore impacts the provision of public goods. The literature on encouraging formalization has predominantly focused on...

A broadly accepted view contends that the 2007-09 financial crisis in the U.S. was caused by an expansion in the supply of credit to subprime borrowers during the 2001- 2006 credit boom, leading to the spike in defaults and foreclosures that sparked the crisis. We use a large administrative...

Firms in developing countries often avoid paying taxes by making informal payments to tax officials. These bribes may raise the cost of operating a business, and the price charged to consumers. To decrease these costs, we designed a feedback incentive scheme for business tax inspectors that...

With 20 years of PSID data, we document persistent racial differentials in life-cycle consumption dynamics. Starting from similar positions in the consumption distribution Blacks end up in lower percentiles than Whites. Education, income, and wealth are three key drivers of these different...