We match French export and Madagascan import declarations using container identifiers and account for shipment-specific transport costs to identify declarations and firms at risk of tariff evasion, examine how evasion occurs, and assess customs enforcement. Tariff liabilities calculated from French declarations exceed those based on corresponding Madagascan declarations by 24 percent in aggregate. This tariff revenue gap is highly concentrated: the five importers with the largest positive gaps account for three-quarters of it. Undervaluation accounts for approximately two-thirds of implied tariff revenue losses, with product misclassification accounting for the remainder. Larger-value containers facing high tariffs appear at greater risk of evasion. Many reporting discrepancies are nevertheless inconsistent with tariff minimization: For approximately two-fifths of containers, tariff liabilities calculated from Madagascan declarations exceed those based on French declarations. Customs value adjustments are ineffective, reducing implied tariff revenue losses by only 1.8 percent.
This paper investigates the impact of natural gas flaring—a byproduct of oil production—on agricultural productivity in Nigeria. Using a panel dataset of Nigerian households from the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) spanning 2012–2018, combined with geocoded data on monthly gas flaring volumes from oil fields, the study employs variation in the timing of interview surveys to assess effects of gas flaring during harvest and planting seasons. The analysis focuses on southern Nigeria, where oil production is concentrated, and leverages a 2010 policy reform (Local Content Act) that increased local onshore oil activities and thus gas flaring.The empirical strategy includes fixed effects (household, and region-by-month-by-year) to control for unobserved heterogeneity, weather variables (precipitation and temperature), and an instrumental variable approach using global oil price changes interacted with pre-sample flaring intensity to address endogeneity. Key outcomes measured are real crop yield per hectare and labor productivity (real agricultural output divided by worker-days).The findings reveal significant negative effects during the harvest season, particularly in rainy periods, but minimal impacts during planting. Mechanisms are explored through satellite data on air pollutants, showing elevated levels of black carbon, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide in flaring areas. Robustness checks confirm the results against various confounders like conflicts, oil spills, and placebo tests.The paper contributes to literature on the impact of air pollution on worker productivity and crop yields and climate change impacts on agriculture, highlighting policy needs to mitigate environmental costs from extractive industries in developing countries.
We study how terrorist attacks targeting educational institutions affect private development aid through child sponsorship. Conceptually, terrorist events may increase sponsorship by signaling greater need or reduce it if affected communities are seen as less effective destinations to support. We combine global administrative data from Plan International on child sponsorship across 50 countries over the 2008-2018 period, aggregated at the Primary Sampling Unit (PSU) level, with geocoded terrorism events from the Global Terrorism Database. Our core specification focuses on attacks against educational institutions within 20 km of each PSU. We estimate the causal effect using a heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences approach suited to staggered, non-absorbing treatments. We find that attacks on educational institutions reduce the share of sponsored children by about 3 percentage points, a 4 percent decline relative to the mean. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest this corresponds to funding losses of approximately US$615,000 across affected communities over the study period. Since sponsorship is geographically targeted, these losses fall on the specific communities, underscoring the need to buffer local development funding against security shocks.
This paper studies how hukou-based education wedges and child-arrangement costs jointly shape welfare and intergenerational educational mobility in China. I develop a quantitative spatial model with overlapping generations in which households sequentially choose education, migration, and child arrangement, and estimate it using census and household-survey data. Under a common financing rule, two child-targeted policies raise the co-migration rate to a similar extent but differ sharply in welfare and mobility. Subsidizing co-migrating families in high-cost destinations generates 1.4 times as much welfare per unit of government revenue as removing migrant children’s education-access wedges. These gains concentrate on recipients. Removing the education-access wedges delivers over four times the mobility gain per unit of revenue, and the resulting human capital generates growing welfare gains across generations. A broader reform that equalizes public-service access for all migrants is the most welfare-efficient but does not raise mobility.
Students in low-income contexts often lack guidance in their career decisions, which can lead to a misallocation of educational investments. We report on a randomized field experiment conducted with 1715 students in rural Cambodia and show that a half-day career guidance workshop designed to support adolescents in developing occupational aspirations on average increased educational investments. We document substantial heterogeneity in treatment effects by baseline student performance. While the workshop increased schooling efforts of high-performing students, treated low-performing students reduced their educational investments. We develop a simple model that explains this treatment effect heterogeneity by baseline performance.
