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Economic development is often conceived as structural transformation and migration out of rural agriculture (Lewis, 1954; Fei & Ranis, 1964). Understanding development therefore requires us to identify how rural economies transform in response to emigration. We study how international migration reshapes domestic economic activity in origin households using a randomized visa lottery that gave Bangladeshi men job opportunities in Malaysia. Winning the lottery raises total household income through remittances, but income earned in Bangladesh declines due to contractions in nonfarm business activity. In contrast, crop income remains stable despite large reductions in agricultural input expenditures, because farming gets delegated through land rental markets. We identify a “supervision constraint” that explains why households divest from nonfarm business activity. The key input that is lost through male migration is not land, labor, or physical capital, but “management capacity”.

Do elections aggregate the private information of office-motivated candidates? Our answer stems from a general result for two-player constant-sum Bayesian games with type-independent payoffs. Under a “completeness” statistical condition, every “identifiable” equilibrium is an ex-post equilibrium. Applied to Downsian elections, the ex-post property implies a sharp bound on information aggregation: equilibrium voter welfare is at best equal to the efficient use of a single candidate’s information. In canonical specifications, politicians may “anti-pander” (overreact to their information), whereas some degree of pandering would be socially beneficial. We discuss other applications of the ex-post result.

This paper proposes a semi-endogenous growth theory that incorporates technology vintages and the endogenous evolution of multiple technological paradigms through innovation. It provides a characterization of both balanced growth equilibrium and transitional dynamics in an environment where new technologies continuously emerge. From a positive perspective, the model rationalizes two distinct empirical patterns. Using two centuries of US patent data, I first document that the age profile of patents has a pronounced hump shape: most contemporary patents build upon technologies that are between 50 and 100 years old. Second, this age profile has remained stable throughout the past century. From a normative standpoint, the theory underscores a misallocation of research effort induced by the tendency among profit-maximizing firms to overinvest in further developing mature technologies. This yields a suboptimally slow development of emerging technologies. According to a calibrated version of the model, correcting such misallocation could generate welfare gains of 7%.

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) provides infant formula to low-income households through state-level exclusive supply contracts that cover roughly half of U.S. infants. Although these contracts directly govern purchases by WIC participants, they also affect households that receive no WIC benefits. We study these spillovers using household-level in-store and online transaction data matched to WIC contract changes across states from 2018 to 2025. When a manufacturer becomes the WIC supplier, its market share among non-WIC households rises by roughly 30 percentage points in the regular-size formula segment. The response is concentrated in physical stores, where the new supplier’s market share rises by roughly 50 percentage points, while we find little systematic response online or for bulk-size products. This contrast points to the physical retail environment as a central mechanism. Additional evidence from WIC-authorized retailers and hospital formula-practice data suggests that direct exposure to WIC labels and hospital-provided samples account for relatively little of the spillover. The results show that public procurement can substantially reshape demand among untreated consumers by changing the retail environments in which choices are made.

By age 17, a quarter of U.S. students have experienced a peer suicide. Using linked administrative data from South Carolina and a matched difference-in-differences design, we find that exposure to a peer’s self-harm death increases the probability of a self-harm diagnosis by nearly 50% and both the incidence and frequency of mental health visits. Effects on care use and criminal behavior are concentrated among white boys, and responses diverge by prior mental health history: students without a prior diagnosis increase felony offending rather than care-seeking. Deaths from assault and transportation accidents produce no comparable rise in self-harm, consistent with contagion.

We consider the problem of explaining a data generating process (DGP) to a decision maker (DM) who cannot understand it. Explanations are information, not approximations: they are useful because they rule out possible DGPs. If the DM maximizes her average payoff, explanations using OLS are robustly useful, and augmenting them with summary statistics makes them more so. Sampling error can destroy these guarantees, but theoretical assumptions linking that error to the DGP can restore them. If the DM is sufficiently ambiguity averse, explanations that are affine in outcomes are not robustly useful, but certificates reporting lower bounds on outcomes are.

We study the effects of H-1B immigration on U.S. industries that employ H-1B workers and their trading partners. Using a novel cross-industry design and the 1999–2003 expansion of the H-1B visa cap for identification, we find that H-1B exposure raised incomes for natives and pre-existing immigrants, with gains concentrated in non-STEM occupations. Income gains propagate forward through supply chains to downstream industries but not backward to upstream industries, consistent with a productivity shock rather than a labor supply shock. We find no direct effect on patenting, suggesting that productivity gains arise from better task execution rather than patentable invention.
 

We provide evidence that domestic outsourcing increases young-worker entry into the formal sector. Leveraging a pair of 1993–1994 Brazilian reforms that reduced the relative cost of outsourcing security guards, a triple-differences design shows that the reforms increased formal guard employment by 4% and hiring from unemployment or informality by 7%, while reallocating formal employment from older to younger workers and leaving demographic-adjusted wages unchanged. Census data corroborate the rise in formality, driven by the youngest cohorts. The compositional shift mirrors a general pattern in Brazil’s matched employer–employee records: conditional on total firm size, employers with greater occupation-specific scale hire younger workers, paid less at entry and more likely to be entering formal employment for the first time. The evidence is most consistent with contract firms supplying at scale the capabilities needed to hire productive workers from outside the formal sector—a demand-side channel for increasing formal sector employment.