Improving “ last-mile” public service delivery is a recurring challenge in developing countries. Could the widespread adoption of mobile phones provide scalable, cost-effective means for improvement? We use large-scale experiment to evaluate impact phone-based monitoring on program that transferred nearly billion dollars 5.7 million Indian farmers. In randomly selected jurisdictions, officials ...

We document that nearly half of the global decline in agricultural employment was driven by new cohorts entering labor market. A dataset policy reforms supports an interpretation these cohort effects as human capital. Using a model frictional reallocation, we conclude capital growth led to sharp supply, accounting, at fixed prices, for 40 percent decrease employment. This aggregate effect is ha...

To what degree can labor reallocation mitigate the economic consequences of weather-driven agricultural productivity shocks? I estimate that temperature-driven reductions in demand for India are associated with increases nonagricultural employment. This suggests ability sectors to absorb workers may play a key role attenuating shocks. Exploiting firm-level variation propensity workers, relative...

Interference across competing firms in RCTs can be informative about market structure. An experiment that subsidizes a random subset of traders who buy cocoa from farmers Sierra Leone illustrates this idea. Interpreting treatment-control differences prices and quantities purchased through model Cournot competition reveals differentiation between is low. Combining result with quasi-experimental ...

This paper examines how subsistence farmers respond to extreme heat. Using microdata from Peruvian households, we find that high temperatures reduce agricultural productivity, increase area planted, and change crop mix. These findings are consistent with using input adjustments as a short-term mechanism attenuate the effect of heat on output. response seems complement other coping strategies, s...

The integration of markets may improve efficiency by lowering costs or reducing local market power. India, seeking to reduce electricity shortages, recently set up a market for power trade, in which transmission constraints bind nearly half the time, limiting competition between regions and raising prices by forty percent. I use confidential data on bidding to estimate the costs of electricity ...

In the current age of trade and financial openness, local economies in developing countries are becoming increasingly exposed to external investments. The objective of the proposed two-sector model with environmental externalities is to provide an insight into the interaction between external investors and local communities with a focus upon the different strategies and income sources available...

The literature argues that income growth leads to increased demand for environmental quality and thus reduction in pollution. Using a utility theoretic model, we hypothesize that the income±pollution relationship should depend on the level of disamenity of the pollutant. We proxy for disamenity using the toxicity of releases. For counties in the United States, the functional relationship betwee...

Connecting private dwellings to the water main is expensive and typically cannot be publicly financed. We show that households’ willingness to pay for a private connection is high when it can be purchased on credit, not because a connection improves health but because it increases the time available for leisure and reduces interand intra-household conflicts on water matters, leading to sustaine...

We explore heat-related labor impacts both for their own interest and to understand the role of adaptation in responding to climate change. Focusing on non-agricultural sectors in the United States, we find that hot temperatures exert a causal negative impact on county-level payroll – reducing payroll by several percentage points in a 2◦C hotter year – with larger impacts in highly exposed indu...