the role of rural producer organizations for agricultural service provision in fragile states this article assesses the extent of external linkages and the provision of agricultural services by rural producer organizations in a post conflict setting using new survey data collected by the international food policy research institute in three provinces of the democratic republic of the congo this study finds that various internal and external factors affect the capacity of organizations to interact with external organizations external linkages ability to collect financial support from their members management capacity and formal governance structures all contribute to explaining relative performance in agricultural service delivery we also find that exogenous events affect the relative performance of rural producer organizations our results suggest that closeness to conflict reduces the capacity of producer organizations to provide agricultural services

the logic of insurgent electoral violence competitive elections are essential to establishing the political legitimacy of democratizing regimes we argue that insurgents undermine the state s mandate through electoral violence we study insurgent violence during elections using newly declassified microdata on the conflict in afghanistan our data track insurgent activity by hour to within meters of attack locations our results suggest that insurgents carefully calibrate their production of violence during elections to avoid harming civilians leveraging a novel instrumental variables approach we find that violence depresses voting collectively the results suggest insurgents try to depress turnout while avoiding backlash from harming civilians counterfactual exercises provide potentially actionable insights for safeguarding at risk elections and enhancing electoral legitimacy in emerging democracies

structure behavior and voter turnout in the united states electoral participation in the united states is examined to provide a clearer account of the effect of the registration requirement on individual voting behavior pooling nes data from 1980 1984 and 1988 i first model with traditional and selection bias techniques the full electorate to distinguish among three groups nonregistrants registered nonvoters and voters analyses limited to recent movers then reported to understand more fully the forces associated with the actual decision calculi of registering and voting the influences of many factors commonly accepted as important determinants of voting are disentangled and their effect at each stage is ascertained factors yielding inconsistent effects in previ research or believed to be unimportant such as race gender attitudes toward the candidates and trust government are shown to deserve closer scrutiny by electoral scholars

who benefited from burundi s demobilization program this paper assesses the impact of the demobilization reinsertion and reintegration program in post war burundi two major rebel groups benefited from cash and in kind transfers the cndd fdd from 2004 and the fnl from 2010 a panel data of households collected in 2006 and 2010 is combined with official records from the national commission for demobilization reinsertion and reintegration regression analysis shows that the cash payments received by fnl demobilized households had a positive impact on consumption nonfood spending and investments the program also generated positive spillovers in the villages where fnl combatants returned ex combatants indeed spent a large part of their allowance on consumption goods and clothing thereby generating a short run economic boom in villages however the long run evolution of consumption indicators is negative for cndd fdd households as well as for villages where cndd fdd combatants returned suggesting that the direct impact and the spillovers of the program vanished in the long run

volunteerism after the tsunami the effects of democratization using three waves of survey data from fishing villages in aceh indonesia for 2005 09 the paper examines the determinants of local volunteer labor after the tsunami volunteer labor is the village public sector labor force for maintenance clean up and renovation of public capital while also examining the effects on volunteerism of village destruction and trauma pre existing social capital diversity and aid delivery the papers focuses on the effects of democratization the tsunami and massive international aid effort prompted the settlement of the insurgency movement in aceh which had led to suspension of local elections over the prior twenty or more years until 2006 village heads who call volunteer days were effectively selected by village elites who may highly value the public facilities maintained by volunteer labor with elections volunteer days fall under the new regime with democratically elected village heads calling fewer volunteer days which may appeal more to the typical villager identification comes from pseudo randomized differential timing of elections

humanitarian crises and adolescent well being knowledge gaps and prospects adolescence constitutes the second and final window of human growth and a period of specific vulnerabilities such as early pregnancy early marriage hiv infection suicide violence alcohol and drugs only a limited body of research investigates the effects of humanitarian crises on the human capital and well being of adolescents the evidence focuses on the short term effects of conflict and to a lesser extent natural disasters on education physical health and nutrition but not on mental health most analyses examine the situations of individuals exposed in utero and young childhood but rarely during adolescence typically missing are robust empirical identification strategies and estimates on heterogeneous effects across age or gender the lack of quality data and challenges in defining adolescence establishing causality or ensuring ethical research explain the knowledge gaps possible ways to expand the evidence base include mixing georeferenced data on individual location with georeferenced data on crises sharpening quasi experimental analytical techniques and reconsidering the current timing of demographic data collection now spanning 4 or 5 year intervals the failure to make such adjustments will end by ignoring specific vulnerabilities among adolescents and render sustainable progress in well being globally narrowing inequalities and guaranteeing human rights to all more difficult to achieve

do giant oilfield discoveries fuel internal armed conflicts we use new data to examine the effects of giant oilfield discoveries around the world since 1946 on average these discoveries increase per capita oil production and oil exports by up to 50 percent but these giant oilfield discoveries also have a dark side they increase the incidence of internal armed conflict by about 5 8 percentage points this increased incidence of conflict due to giant oilfield discoveries is especially high for countries that had already experienced armed conflicts or coups in the decade prior to discovery

a war is forever the long run effects of early exposure to world war ii on trust abstract this paper examines the long term effect of conflict on trust by using changes in places and timing of combats during world war ii we focus on the pre school period an important life stage for the formation of trust and an age where war exposure may persist throughout life we find robust evidence that individuals exposed to combats in the first six years of life display lower trust and social engagement well into adulthood in light of the well known relationship between trust and collective action our results lend credence to the theory that violent conflict inhibits well functioning government in long run

war and institutions new evidence from sierra leone scholars of economic development have argued that war can have adverse impacts on later economic performance war destroys physical capital and infrastructure and disrupts human capital accumulation and it may also damage institutions by creating political instability destroying the social fabric and endangering civil liberties world bank 2003 understanding war s impact on development is particularly important for sub saharan africa where two thirds of all nations suffered from armed conflict during the 1980s and 1990s the proliferation of armed conflict in the world s poorest region begs the question of what role conflict may be playing in africa s disappointing economic performance yet the net long run effects of war are ambiguous from the point of view of economic theory to the extent that war impacts are limited to the destruction of capital the neoclassical model predicts rapid economic growth postwar converging back to steady state growth several recent papers that study war impacts including in japan donald r davis and david e weinstein 2002 and vietnam miguel and gerard roland 2005 find few persistent local impacts of u s bombing with heavily bombed areas experiencing rapid recovery to prewar population and economic trends this is consistent with the neoclassical model if war s main consequence is to destroy capital war could also affect long run growth either positively or negatively by modifying the scale parameter in the neoclassical growth model for example while the world bank 2003 argues that war has adverse institutional consequences charles h tilly shows how war promoted state formation and nation building in europe historically ultimately strengthening institutions tilly 1975 we study the aftermath of the recent civil conflict in sierra leone one notable aspect of this project is the extensive household data for sierra leone on conflict experiences and on local institutions our results are complementary to the other recent studies mentioned above none of which examines institutional impacts

the impact of regulations on agricultural trade evidence from the sps and tbt agreements according to world trade organization rules countries may adopt regulations under the agreements on sanitary and phyto sanitary sps and technical barriers to trade tbt we analyze the structure of these measures in agricultural trade the inventory approach suggests that european countries have among the lowest coverage ratios of all oecd countries using a gravity equation we also estimate their stringency our results suggest that they significantly reduce developing countries exports to oecd countries but do not affect trade between oecd members furthermore european imports are more negatively influenced by sps and tbts than imports of other oecd countries

equivalent expenditure functions and expenditure dependent equivalence scales abstract this paper presents and investigates a new class of equivalent expenditure functions that is a generalization of the one that corresponds to exact independent of base equivalence scales it provides less restrictive household demands especially for children s goods and has associated equivalence scales that may depend on expenditure we show that under certain conditions equivalent expenditure functions and the associated expenditure dependent equivalence scales can be uniquely estimated from demand data we estimate them using canadian data and find that the resulting scales are both plausible and expenditure dependent the estimated equivalence scales for households with children decline significantly as expenditure increases

the consequences of child soldiering abstract little is known about the impacts of military service on human capital and labor market outcomes due to an absence of data as well as sample selection recruits are self selected screened and selectively survive we examine the case of uganda where rebel recruitment methods provide exogenous variation in conscription economic and educational impacts are widespread and persistent schooling falls by nearly a year skilled employment halves and earnings drop by a third military service seems to be a poor substitute for schooling psychological distress is evident among those exposed to severe war violence and is not limited to ex combatants

an assessment of environmentally related non tariff measures international trade can affect the environment in different ways this may justify the introduction of border measures by the importing countries in addition to various dispositions in the gatt gats trips agreements as well as in the agreement on agriculture this issue is regulated by the agreements on technical barriers to trade tbt and on the application of sanitary and phyto sanitary standards sps despite these rules abuse of environmental arguments for protectionist reasons remains an open issue in order to disentangle protectionism from dispositions justified on the grounds of true environmental concerns we systematically review notifications of sps and tbts by importing countries at the tariff line level trade is considered as being potentially affected when an environmental sps tbt is notified on grounds of environmental concerns affected trade is defined as imports by countries notifying such barriers protectionist use of environmental barriers is likely when only a limited number of countries impose an environmental obstacle on the imports of a given product considering data for 2001 we find that 88 per cent of the value of world trade is in products potentially affected by such measures while 39 per cent of the value of world imports is potentially subject to a protectionist use of such measures agriculture the automobile industry the pharmaceutical industry and many other sectors are concerned

corrigendum to equivalent expenditure functions and equivalent dependent equivalence scales this note is to correct an error in donaldson and pendakur 2004 in this journal in bequivalent expenditure functions and expenditure dependent equivalence scalesq w e propose equivalence scales which are log linear in expenditure and show that they are identifiable from behaviour under the maintained assumption of log linearity in the empirical work we find the equivalence scales for families in comparison with single childless adults to be declining in expenditure equivalence scales which vary with expenditure allow expenditure shares for children s goods to depend on expenditure and in the empirical work we find the expenditure share equation for children s clothing to be declining in expenditure in the empirical work we estimated a 10 good quadratic almost ideal demand system over 60 price regimes to recover equivalence scales wherein one of the goods was children s clothing unfortunately we have since discovered that the children s clothing data are only comparable for the first 45 price regimes in the data in particular in the data for the first 45 price regimes children s clothing is defined as clothing for children aged less than 14 but in the data for the last 15 price regimes it is defined as clothing for children aged less than 4 to assess the importance of this error we estimated two new demand systems 1 a 9 good demand system which is identical to the original except that clothing for adults and clothing for children are pooled into a single good called dclothingt and 2 a 10 good demand system which is identical to the original except that it is estimated on only cases facing the first 45 price regimes we use the first new demand

collective action in diverse sierra leone communities scholars have identified ethnic divisions as a leading cause of underdevelopment due partially to their adverse effects on public goods we investigate this issue in post war sierra leone one of the world s poorest and most ethnically diverse countries to address concerns over endogenous local ethnic composition we use an instrumental variables strategy using earlier census data on ethnicity and include several historical and geographic covariates perhaps surprisingly we find that local diversity is not associated with worse public goods provision across multiple outcomes and specifications with precisely estimated zeros we investigate the role of historical factors in generating the findings

mine yours or ours the efficiency of household investment decisions an experimental approach we conduct an experiment to measure the relative importance of key factors that influence the efficiency of household investment decisions we find that both for men and women their spouse s access to information does not affect efficiency however they are willing to sacrifice much efficiency for greater personal control over household income intriguingly even when spouses control over household income is exogenously assigned inefficiency persists as a wife s assigned share increases husbands undercut their own income to reduce hers this self destructive and spiteful behavior is best explained by non economic factors such as identity seldom emphasized in mainstream household economic models

counterfeit product trade the authors analyze trade in both legitimate and counterfeit products domestic firms ow n trademarks and establish reputations for delivering high quality pr oducts in a steady state equilibrium foreign suppliers export legiti mate low quality merchandise and counterfeits of domestic brand name merchandise heterogeneous home consumers either purchase low quality imports or brand name products rationally expecting some degree of counterfeiting of the latter the authors describe the positive and normative effects of counterfeiting in comparison with a no counterfe iting benchmark they also provide a welfare analysis of border inspe ction policy and of policy regarding the disposition of counterfeit g oods that are confiscated at the border copyright 1988 by american economic association

selection on observed and unobserved variables assessing the effectiveness of catholic schools in this paper we measure the effect of catholic high school attendance on educational attainment and test scores because we do not have a good instrumental variable for catholic school attendance we develop new estimation methods based on the idea that the amount of selection on the observed explanatory variables in a model provides a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables we also propose an informal way to assess selectivity bias based on measuring the ratio of selection on unobservables to selection on observables that would be required if one is to attribute the entire effect of catholic school attendance to selection bias we use our methods to estimate the effect of attending a catholic high school on a variety of outcomes our main conclusion is that catholic high schools substantially increase the probability of graduating from high school and more tentatively attending college we find little evidence of an effect on test scores

when arm s length is too far relationship banking over the credit cycle we conduct face to face interviews with bank ceos to classify 397 banks across 21 countries as either relationship or transaction lenders we then use the geographic coordinates of these banks branches and of 14 100 businesses to analyze how the lending techniques of banks in the vicinity of firms are related to credit constraints at two contrasting points of the credit cycle we find that while relationship lending is not associated with credit constraints during a credit boom it alleviates such constraints during a downturn this positive role of relationship lending is stronger for small and opaque firms and in regions with a more severe economic downturn moreover our evidence suggests thatrelationship lending mitigates the impact of a downturn on firm growth and does not constitute evergreening of loans

schooling violent conflict and gender in burundi this paper investigates the effect of exposure to violent conflict on human capital accumulation in burundi it combines a nationwide household survey with secondary sources on the location and timing of the conflict only 20 percent of the birth cohorts studied 1971 1986 completed primary education depending on the specification the probability of completing primary schooling for a boy exposed to violent conflict declines by 7 to 17 percentage points compared to a nonexposed boy with a decline of 11 percentage points in the preferred specification in addition exposure to violent conflict reduces the gender gap in schooling but only for girls from nonpoor households forced displacement is one of the channels through which conflict affects schooling the results are robust to various specifications and estimation methods

protests and trust in the state evidence from african countries this paper provides empirical evidence that after protests citizens substantially revise their views on the current leader but also their trust in the country s institutions the empirical strategy exploits variation in the timing of an individual level survey and the proximity to social protests in 13 african countries first we find that trust in political leaders strongly and abruptly decreases after protests second trust in the country monitoring institutions plunges as well both effects are much stronger when protests are repressed by the government as no signs of distrust are recorded even a couple of days before the social conflicts protests can be interpreted as sudden signals sent on a leaders actions from which citizens extract information on their country fundamentals

not just a work permit eu citizenship and the consumption behavior of documented and undocumented immigrants this paper explores the impact of the 2007 european union enlargement on the consumption behavior of immigrant households using data from a unique italian survey and a difference in differences approach we find that the enlargement induced a significant consumption increase for the immigrant households from new member states both in the short and in the medium run this enlargement effect cannot be attributed to the mere legalization as it concerns both undocumented and documented immigrants albeit through different channels detailed information on immigrants legal status undocumented documented and sector of employment informal formal allows us to shed light on the exact mechanisms following the enlargement previously undocumented immigrants experienced an increase in the labor income by moving from the informal towards the formal economy whereas immigrants who were already working legally in italy benefitted from the increased probability of getting a permanent contract enhanced employment stability in turn reduced the uncertainty about future labor income leading to an increase in documented immigrants consumption expenditure

child health and conflict in cote d ivoire we examine the impact of the 2002 07 civil conflict in cote d ivoire on children s health status measured by height for age we use pre and post war survey data coupled with information on the location of violent incidents to capture exposure to the conflict of children born during 1997 2007 our results indicate that children from regions more affected by the conflict suffered significant health setbacks compared with children from less affected regions further household level victimization such as war related economic stress health stress and displacement has a large and negative effect on child health in conflict affected regions

does foreign aid target the poorest to examine the extent to which foreign aid reaches people at different levels of wealth in africa i use household surveys to measure the subnational distribution of a country s population by wealth quintiles and match this information to data on the location of aid projects from two multilateral donors within countries aid disproportionately flows to regions with more of the richest people aid does not favor regions with more of the poorest people these findings violate the stated preferences of the multilateral donors under study suggesting that the donors either cannot or are not willing to exercise control over the location of aid projects within countries the results also suggest that aid is not being allocated effectively to alleviate extreme poverty

war and local collective action in sierra leone abstract we study the brutal 1991 2002 sierra leone civil war using nationally representative household data on conflict experiences postwar economic outcomes local politics and collective action individuals whose households directly experienced more intense war violence are robustly more likely to attend community meetings more likely to join local political and community groups and more likely to vote tests using prewar controls and alternative samples suggest that selection into victimization is unlikely to be driving the results more speculatively the findings could help partially explain the rapid postwar political and economic recoveries observed in sierra leone and after several other recent african civil wars

leviathan as an inventor an extended agency model of state owned versus private firm invention in emerging and developed economies we examine the relative merits of state soe and private poe ownership on firm invention output in emerging as well as developed economies firm soe affords a vehicle by which governments throughout the world encourage risky investment in new technological paths yet from a traditional agency theoretical standpoint soes are plagued by low powered incentives and dysfunctional involvement e g wasteful budgets and political meddling which reduces soe performance relative to poes to examine this paradox we build an extended agency model which rather than overlooking agency cost drivers entertains a more balanced view in which these so called agency liabilities in fact benefit soes particularly in the sphere of inventions we argue that given relatively higher levels of managerial autonomy soes may outperform poes in some types of inventive output we further propose that key boundary conditions operate to modify this base effect in that contexts lacking political constraints a condition found in most emerging economies increase the risk of political meddling reducing managerial autonomy so that any soe inventive advantages wane significantly we also hypothesize that this negative effect of weak institutions is attenuated in high invention productivity sectors empirically we track the frequency pioneerism and impact of patent inventions of 521 soes and matched poes for 16 years across 43 countries and 22 industries we find empirical support for our hypotheses based on a robust set of fixed effects regression analyses aided by a battery of checks to assess self selection and omitted variable bias

income and livelihoods in the war in afghanistan we explore the impact of the insurgency and military deployment on the livelihoods of local communities in afghanistan we use monthly wages and commodity prices at the provincial level over the period 2003 09 and look for their response to conflict events and isaf deployment overall we find that prices are more sensitive to deployment than to attacks commodity prices are not significantly affected by insurgent violence which is consistent with coping strategies already in place on the opposite military deployment is associated with an increase in the levels of wages and commodity prices as isaf is a new source of uncertainty

employment risk and job seeker performance using detailed labor recruitment data in combination with randomized variation in individuals outside job opportunities i show that providing job certainty during recruitment leads to substantial job seeker performance gains job seeker performance is highest and effort lowest among those assigned to receive a guaranteed outside job offer where employment risk is eliminated while performance is lowest and effort highest among those receiving no chance of an outside job offer performance among those assigned uncertain outside job offers consistently lies between the two extremes i conjecture that the pattern of results is most consistent with stress induced performance reductions attributable to job uncertainty i rule out several other competing theories

social capital conflict and welfare abstract this paper analyzes the role of external conflict as a force that can create social capital hostile inter group interactions can help to resolve intra group social dilemmas but these potential gains must be weighed against the insecurity of hostile relations with an out group our central result is that the presence of an outside threat can induce higher levels of social capital either because a protective aspect of social capital comes into play and or as a reallocation of investments from private to social capital given that social capital is potentially subject to free riding the threat by promoting a greater level of social capital can be welfare improving when the threat is severe social capital and welfare are more likely to fall this effect of an external threat on social capital is stronger in poor economies these results can shed light on the sometimes contradicting empirical evidence on the relationship between conflict and social capital

the violent legacy of conflict evidence on asylum seekers crime and public policy in switzerland we study empirically how past exposure to conflict in origin countries makes migrants more violence prone in their host country focusing on asylum seekers in switzerland we exploit a novel and unique dataset on all crimes reported in switzerland by the nationalities of perpetrators and of victims over 2009 2016 our baseline result is that cohorts exposed to civil conflict mass killing during childhood are 35 percent more prone to violent crime than the average cohort this effect is particularly strong for early childhood exposure and is mostly confined to co nationals consistent with inter group hostility persisting over time we exploit cross region heterogeneity in public policies within switzerland to document which integration policies are best able to mitigate the detrimental effect of past conflict exposure on violent criminality we find that offering labor market access to asylum seekers eliminates two thirds of the effect

respect responsibility and development abstract we develop a theory that explains how two core values respect for others and responsibility affect productivity the accumulation of capital and output per worker using data from the world values survey we empirically test the model using a panel dataset that includes 82 countries over six distinct years we find that these two core values are important to production and that their impact is substantial we also show that respect and responsibility reduce the influence of trust and mitigate the negative macroeconomic effects associated with fractionalized societies our results are robust to various treatments for endogeneity and under alternative samples

making eu trade agreements work the role of rules of origin a key element of the eu s free trade and preferential trade agreements is the extent to which they deliver improved market access and so contribute to the eu s foreign policy objectives towards developing countries and neighbouring countries in europe including the countries of the balkans previous preferential trade schemes have been ineffective in delivering improved access to the eu market since only a small proportion of the available preferences have actually been utilised the main reason for this is probably the very restrictive rules of origin that the eu imposes coupled with the costs of proving consistency with these rules if the eu wants the everything but arms agreement and free trade agreements with countries in the balkans to generate substantial improvements in access to the eu market for products from these countries then it will have to reconsider the current rules of origin and implement less restrictive rules backed up by a careful safeguards policy

on estimating the effects of immigrant legalization do u s agricultural workers really benefit the question of whether legalization affects immigrants economic returns has been the focus of many empirical studies in recent decades results have consistently shown that there are significant wage differences between legal and illegal workers however the validity of such findings has been questioned given the lack of good identification strategies to account for omitted variables in this article we propose using techniques designed to address the issue of selection into treatment based to some degree on unobservables our results suggest that lower skill levels not discrimination explain differences in immigrants economic outcomes in recent decades the united states has experienced a substantial increase in the number of undocumented immigrants entering the country as well as documented immigrants overstaying their legally permitted time passel 2005 according to estimates provided by passel and cohn 2009 the united states is now home to approximately 12 million unauthorized immigrants this phenomenon has caused dramatic changes in the agricultural workforce with the ratio between undocumented and legal farm workers rising from only 16 in the period 1989 92 to 36 in 1993 95 and 50 in 1998 2000 iway emerson and walters 2006 in an attempt to control this flow of illegal immigrants the u s government proposed several changes to its immigration policy it not only increased border security but also introduced sanctions for u s employers that hire unauthorized workers and launched several amnesty programs such as the 1986 immigration reform and control act irca and the comprehensive immigration reform act of 2006 cira both of which allow agricultural workers to acquire legal permanent residence status

saving two in a billion quantifying the trade effect of european food safety standards on african exports abstract a growing concern over health risks associated with food products has prompted close examination of sanitary and phytosanitary standards in industrialized countries this paper quantifies the impact of a new harmonized aflatoxin standard set by the eu on food exports from africa we employ a gravity model to estimate the impact of changes in differing levels of protection based on the eu standard in contrast to those suggested by international standards the analysis is based on trade and regulatory survey data for 15 european countries and nine african countries between 1989 and 1998 our results suggest that the implementation of the new aflatoxin standard in the eu will have a negative impact on african exports of cereals dried fruits and nuts to europe the new eu standard which would reduce health risk by approximately 1 4 deaths per billion a year will decrease these african exports by 64 or us 670 million in contrast to regulation set through an international standard

regionalism in standards good or bad for trade regional agreements on standards have been largely ignored by economists and unconditionally blessed by multilateral trade rules the authors find theoretically and empirically that such agreements increase trade between participating countries but not necessarily with the rest of the world adopting a common standard in a region that is harmonization boosts exports of excluded industrial countries to the region but it reduces exports of excluded developing countries possibly because developing country firms are hurt more by an increase in the stringency of standards and benefit less from economies of scale in integrated markets mutual recognition agreements are more uniformly trade promoting unless they contain restrictive rules of origin in which case intra regional trade increases at the expense of trade with other especially developing countries the authors propose a modification of international trade rules to strike a better balance between the interests of integrating and excluded countries

the identification of fixed costs from consumer behavior some household expenditures such as those for subsistence or basic needs are fixed using the methodology of equivalence scales we develop a model in which differences in fixed costs of characteristics across households can be identified from household behavior equivalent expenditure for a household is the expenditure needed to bring a reference household such as a single childless adult to the level of well being of household members the equivalence scale for the household is the ratio of expenditure to equivalent expenditure only two types of equivalent expenditure functions are used in practice those in which the ratio of household expenditure and equivalent expenditure is independent of expenditure and those in which their difference is independent of expenditure we propose a class of equivalent expenditure functions that allows for differences in fixed costs and generalizes both relationships using canadian consumer demand microdata we estimate equivalent expenditure functions and equiva

estimating the distortionary effects of ethnic quotas in singapore using housing transactions abstract 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 quantity differences for constrained versus unconstrained blocks i test these predictions by hand matching more than 500 000 names in the phonebook to ethnicities to calculate ethnic proportions at the apartment block level i can then investigate differences for constrained and unconstrained blocks close to the quota limits and test for sorting around the limits i find that price differences are between 3 and 5 quantity effects are economically significant translating to longer time on market durations selection cannot fully explain these results my results point to challenges in achieving desegregation using quantity restrictions

skill transferability migration and development evidence from population resettlement in indonesia we use a natural experiment in indonesia to provide causal evidence on the role of location specific human capital and skill transferability in shaping the spatial distribution of productivity from 1979 1988 the transmigration program relocated two million migrants from rural java and bali to new rural settlements in the outer islands villages assigned migrants from regions with more similar agroclimatic endowments exhibit higher rice productivity and nighttime light intensity one to two decades later we find some evidence of migrants adaptation to agroclimatic change overall our results suggest that regional productivity differences may overstate the potential gains from migration

mining away the preston curve summary i estimate the long term national health and education impacts of having a larger mining share in the economy by instrumenting the relative size of the mining sector with the natural geological variation in countries fossil fuel endowments i provide evidence suggestive of a causal relationship the findings suggest that countries with larger mining shares tend to have poorer health and education outcomes than countries with similar per capita incomes geographic characteristics and institutional quality doubling the mining share of an economy corresponds to on average the infant death rate being 20 higher life expectancy being 5 lower total years of education being 20 lower and 70 more people having no formal education divergences from the preston curve the concave relationship between cross country income and life expectancy that has long been of interest to economists demographers and epidemiologists are thus partly explained by the size of the mining sector within country evidence from indonesia paints a similar picture my results provide support for a growing body of evidence linking mining to poorer average living standards particularly vis a vis other types of income i also estimate the effects of national mining dependence on non mining income health and education investment and institutions

out of the ashes into the fire the consequences of u s weapons sales for political violence abstract we examine the effect of u s weapons purchases on political violence in 191 countries during the period 1970 2008 our identification strategy exploits exogenous shifts in the cost of purchasing u s commercial weapons through a combination of time variation in u s inflation and cross sectional variation in a country s historical frequency of purchases we find that weapons purchases reduce the likelihood of political repression but increase the likelihood of onset of civil war in purchasing countries the results suggest that state investment in military capability incites civil war in countries where state repression of an aggrieved opposition would have otherwise prevailed