We investigate the impact of a large-scale Mexican program to replace dirt floors with cement floors on child health and adult happiness. We find that replacing dirt floors with cement significantly improves the health of young children measured by decreases in the incidence of parasitic...

In the past 40 years, a large number of children have been abandoned or abducted in China. We argue that the implementation of the one-child policy has significantly increased both child abandonment and child abduction and that, furthermore, the cultural preference for sons in China has shaped...

This paper analyzes the impact of the elimination of the initial fixed costs of registration on the decision of informal firms to operate formally in Bogotá, Colombia. The Chamber of Commerce of Bogotá (CCB) conducts workshops for prospective formal-sector entrants and arranges personalized...

We develop a stochastic model of electoral competition in order to study the economic and political determinants of trade policy. We model a small open economy with two tradable goods, each of which is produced using a sector specific factor (e.g., land and capital) and another factor that is...

A fundamental question in economics is whether happiness increases pari passu with improvements in material conditions or whether humans grow accustomed to better conditions over time. We rely on a large-scale experiment to examine what kind of impact the provision of housing to extremely poor...

The Political Coase Theorem (PCT) states that, in the absence of transaction costs, agents should agree to implement e fficient policies regardless of the distribution of bargaining power among them. This paper uses a laboratory experiment to explore how commitment problems undermine the...