UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

ROSS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

No understanding of the economic development of modern Africa can be complete without an appreciation of the role of natural resources. Our study is at the nexus of resources, conflict, and development, using theory and high-resolution spatial data from sub-Saharan Africa. Our results help explain why the most resource-rich countries are no better off than the most resource-poor.

pdf | july 2020

Journal of Development Economics (forthcoming)

Income shocks in early life have large, lasting effects on mental health.

pdf | blog | Journal of Political Economy, 2019 127(4)

Iodized salt increased women's income and labor force participation in the 20th century US.

pdf | Review of Economics and Statistics, 2020, 102(2)

Does childhood exposure to war perpetuate cycles of conflict in Africa?

pdf | blog | Economic Development and Cultural Change (forthcoming)

Households use small business activity to weather income shocks.

pdf | published | World Bank Economic Review, 2019 (December)

pdf | American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2015, 7(3)

pdf | appendix | Review of Economic Studies, 2014, 81(4)

Soft skills training on-the-job boosts worker productivity and generates large returns for the firm.

pdf | may 2021

Revise and resubmit, Journal of Political Economy

When workers face productivity shocks, managers reallocate tasks within teams, shifting workers away from jobs in which their performance is most affected.

pdf | march 2021

Revise and resubmit, Journal of Political Economy

What makes a good manager good? We let the data tell us -- and find that hard-to-observe things like attention and control have large effects on productivity, and are drastically undervalued in manager pay.

pdf | december 2020

Revise and resubmit, Review of Economic Studies

A randomized evaluation of Hirschman's (1970) seminal theory. Workers quit when wage increases do not meet their expectations, but enabling voice mitigates this exit.

pdf | may 2020

Revise and resubmit, Economic Journal

Worker satisfaction depends critically on how expectations are set by firms. Migrant workers experienced large losses in subjective wellbeing when randomized improvements in hostel living conditions were more modest than expected.

pdf | july 2020

Revise and resubmit, Journal of Public Economics

Cash transfers mitigate a large fraction of the negative impact of early life shocks on educational attainment and employment outcomes.

pdf | january 2021

Revise and resubmit, Economic Journal

We ask whether information can be delivered without negative consequences to mental health. We randomly assigned individuals to receive Covid-19 information through text messages, a pre-recorded audio message, or phone calls. Phone calls were effective at engaging individuals. They improved Covid-19 knowledge and reduced depression and anxiety; the amount of information delivered does not account for this effect.

pdf | january 2021

Conditionally accepted, Journal of Development Economics

Increasing access to nontechnical amenities substantially drives up the demand for cataract surgery in Mexico.

pdf | july 2020

Reject and Resubmit, Review of Economics and Statistics

Temperature shocks during the in utero period significantly contribute to the adult mental health disease burden in Africa.

pdf | blog | february 2019

Reject and resubmit, Journal of Human Resources

Do talented managers match with productive workers, or with those who are struggling to perform? We find negative assortative matching of managers and workers. Despite supermodularity of production, "misallocating" managerial skill in this way may be optimal for firms who value buyer relationships.

pdf | january 2021

Relational contracts are essential building blocks of the theory of the firm, but we know little about the form or function of these contracts in practice. We study the behavior of managers who share workers across teams to weather absenteeism shocks. Relationships have some smoothing value, but many potentially beneficial transfers are left unrealized. We simulate the gains to increased relationship formation and find that the firm could reduce worker misallocation and increase productivity substantially by spurring relationship formation.

pdf | march 2021

Can policy protect against the often devastating human impacts of environmental shocks? We study this question by leveraging data from a situation in which a tornado tore through an area involved in a double-blind cluster-randomized controlled trial of at-birth vitamin A supplementation in Bangladesh.

pdf | march 2021