We survey young job seekers in rural India to understand the determinants of enrollment in a government training program with guaranteed placement into urban jobs. Respondents are over-optimistic: they expect jobs that pay more and are closer to home than actual placement opportunities. We implement an RCT and provide them with objective information on the distribution of placement salaries or job locations. The intervention successfully corrects subjects’ beliefs, which affects their decision to enroll in the program. By revealed preferences, our estimates suggest that job seekers need to be paid 50% more to work outside their home state.

We use a randomized experiment to evaluate the impact of providing richer information about prospective jobs to vocational trainees on their employment outcomes. The setting of the study is the vocational training program DDU-GKY in India. We find that including in the training two information sessions about placement opportunities make trainees 18% more likely to stay in the jobs in which they are placed. We provide suggestive evidence that the effect is driven by improved selection into training: as a result of the intervention, trainees that are over-optimistic about placement jobs are more likely to drop out before placement.

This paper evaluates a large urban public works program randomly rolled out across neighborhoods of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We find the program increased public employment and reduced private labor supply among beneficiaries and improved local amenities in treated locations. We then combine a spatial equilibrium model and unique commuting data to estimate the spillover effects of the program on private sector wages across neighborhoods: under full program rollout, wages increased by 18.6 percent. Using our model, we show that welfare gains to the poor are six times larger when we include the indirect effects on private wages and local amenities. (JEL H76, I38, J22, J31, O15, O18, R23)

This paper argues that migrants’ decision to bring their dependent family members shapes their consumption behavior, their choice of destination, and their sensitivity to migration barriers. We document that in China: (i) rural migrants disproportionately move to expensive cities; (ii) in these cities they live without their family and in poorer housing conditions; and (iii) they remit more, especially when living without their family. We then develop a quantitative general equilibrium spatial model in which migrant households choose whether, how (with or without their family), and where to migrate. We estimate the model using plausibly exogenous variation in wages, housing prices, and exposure to family migration costs. We use the model to estimate migration costs and relate them to migration policy. We find that hukou policies protect workers in large, expensive, and high income cities at the expense of rural households, who use remittances to overcome some of these costs.

How does rural-urban migration shape urban production in devel-oping countries? We use longitudinal data on Chinese manufactur-ing firms between 2000 and 2006, and exploit exogenous variation in rural-urban migration induced by agricultural income shocks for identification. We find that, when immigration increases, man-ufacturing production becomes more labor intensive and produc-tivity declines. We investigate the reorganization of production using patent applications and product information. We show that rural-urban migration induces both labor-oriented technolog-ical change and the adoption of labor intensive product varieties. (JEL D24, L23, L60, O33, P25, P31, R23)

This paper provides new theory and evidence on how the consumption patterns of the “floating population” of rural migrants affect the distribution of activity across Chinese cities. We first show (i) that rural migrants sort into cities were wages are high, but rents are also high, (ii) that in these cities they live in poorer housing conditions and without their children, (iii) especially so in cities with tighter registration (Hukou) requirements that make it harder for them to settle. We then develop a quantitative spatial model in which migrants partly consume in their origin location. We estimate the model and compute counterfactual migration flows when rural migrants consume all of their income in cities: we predict that they would move away from large, high wage and high rent cities.

Managing the outbreak of COVID-19 in India constitutes an unprecedented health emergency in one of the largest and most diverse nations in the world. On May 4, 2020, India started the process of releasing its population from a national lockdown during which extreme social distancing was implemented. We describe and simulate an adaptive control approach to exit this situation, while maintaining the epidemic under control. Adaptive control is a flexible counter-cyclical policy approach, whereby different areas release from lockdown in potentially different gradual ways, dependent on the local progression of the dis- ease. Because of these features, adaptive control requires the ability to decrease or increase social distancing in response to observed and projected dynamics of the disease outbreak. We show via simulation of a stochastic Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model and of a synthetic intervention (SI) model that adaptive control performs at least as well as immediate and full release from lockdown starting May 4 and as full release from lockdown after a month (i.e., after May 31). The key insight is that adaptive response provides the option to increase or decrease socioeconomic activity depending on how it affects disease progression and this freedom allows it to do at least as well as most other policy alternatives. We also discuss the central challenge to any nuanced release policy, including adaptive control, specifically learning how specific policies translate into changes in contact rates and thus COVID-19's reproductive rate in real time.

This paper provides new evidence on rural-urban migration decisions in developing countries. Using original survey data from rural India, we show that seasonal migrants prefer to earn 35 percent less on local public works rather than incur the cost of migrating. Structural estimates suggest that the fixed cost of migration is small, and can be entirely explained by travel costs and income risk. In contrast, the flow cost of migration is high. We argue that higher living costs in the city explain only a small part of the flow cost of migration and that most of it is non-monetary.

Can e-governance reforms improve government policy? By making information available on a real-time basis, information technologies may reduce the theft of public funds. We analyze a large field experiment and the nationwide scale-up of a reform to India’s workfare program. Advance payments were replaced by “ just-in-time” payments, triggered by e-invoicing, making it easier to detect misreporting. Leakages went down: program expenditures dropped by 24 percent, while employment slightly increased; there were fewer fake households in the official database; and program officials’ personal wealth fell by 10 percent. However, payment delays increased. The nationwide scale-up resulted in a persistent 19 percent reduction in program expenditure. (JEL C93, D72, I38, O15, O17)

The public health response to COVID-19 in many countries has involved strict restrictions on movement and economic activity which threaten the livelihoods of economically vulnerable households. In response, governments are adopting emergency economic measures to provide households with some safety net. We provide an overview of the policies that could form a comprehensive social protection strategy in low-income and middle-income countries, with examples of specific policies that have been adopted. Our core argument is that these countries can cast an emergency safety net with extensive coverage if they use a broader patchwork of solutions than higher-income countries. These strategies could include expanding their social insurance system, building on existing social assistance programmes, and involving local governments and non-state institutions to identify and assist vulnerable groups who are otherwise harder to reach.

How do changes in agricultural productivity affect firms? Using the predictions of a simple multi-sector general equilibrium model of the local economy and exploiting weather-induced agricultural volatility across India, I estimate the response of manufacturing firms to changes in agricultural productivity. I show that negative agricultural productivity shocks lower the cost of labor but that this does not cause firms to hire more. Firms’ production and employment in fact decrease because the shocks also reduce local income and hence the demand that firms face. My estimates provide evidence for a significant local demand effect. I then use my framework to show that this has key policy implications. I examine the introduction of a rural workfare program and assess how it affects firms. I show that the program attenuates the impact of negative agricultural shocks on firms because of its counter-cyclical effects on local wage and demand for manufacturing goods. The results highlight how policies that target households and increase their income can affect local market size and therefore the industrial sector through their general equilibrium effects. ⇤University of Cambridge, Faculty of Economics, Austin Robinson Building, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DD, United Kingdom. Email: gabriella.santangelo@econ.cam.ac.uk. This paper is based on my PhD dissertation at Yale University. I am extremely grateful to my advisors, Mark Rosenzweig, Chris Udry and Nancy Qian, for their guidance and support. I would also like to thank Shameel Amhad, Muneeza Alam, David Atkin, Alex Cohen, Sabysachi Das, Gabriele Foa’, Doug Gollin, Tim Guinnane, Clement Imbert, Dean Karlan, Daniel Keniston, Kaivan Munshi, Barbara Petrongolo, Tommaso Porzio, Camilla Roncoroni, Nick Ryan, Meredith Startz, Paul Schultz, John Strauss, Russell Toth, Jeff Weaver, Eric Weese and seminar/conference participants at CEPR/IGC Conference on Labor Markets in Developing Countries, Barcelona GSE Summer Forum, USC, Warwick, Zurich, Bocconi, Toulouse, Stockholm, Oxford, UC Davis, EIEF, Queen Mary, Yale, Carlo Alberto, Cambridge, KU Leuven, EEA-ESEM Lisbon, 18th IEA World Congress and Bank of Italy for helpful comments and discussions at various stages of this project. This research was supported by grants from the Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (SYLFF). All errors are mine.

This paper studies the effect of India's rural public works program on rural-to-urban migration and urban labor markets. We find that seasonal migration from rural districts that implemented the program decreased relative to those that were selected to, but did not implement it. We use a gravity model and find that real wages rose faster in cities with higher predicted migration from program districts. Since most seasonal migrants work outside of their district, urban wage increases were not limited to program districts, and may have attracted migrants from nonprogram districts. Difference-in-differences may hence be biased. Structural estimates indeed suggest that migration decreased by 22% in program districts, but also increased by 5% in nonprogram districts. As a result, urban wages increased by only 0.5%, against 4.1% if the program had been implemented in all selected districts.

We study the impact of simplification, deterrence, and tax morale on tax compliance. We ran four natural field experiments varying the communication of the tax administration with the universe of income taxpayers in Belgium throughout the tax process. A consistent picture emerges across experiments: (i) simplifying communication substantially increases compliance, (ii) deterrence messages have an additional positive effect, (iii) invoking tax morale is not effective and often backfires. A discontinuity in enforcement intensity, combined with the experimental variation, allows us to compare simplification with standard enforcement measures. We find that simplification is far more cost-effective, allowing for substantial savings on enforcement costs.

This paper provides some of the first empirical evidence on the role of rural-urban migration in manufacturing growth, using Chinese data. We first identify shocks to rural livelihoods caused by variation in international agricultural prices and local climatic conditions. We then combine these shocks with a gravity model to predict yearly migrant inflow into each urban center. Finally, we use household survey data and a census of large firms to estimate the causal impact of migrant inflows on the urban economy. Preliminary results suggest that by increasing labor supply, migration lowers labor costs and increases the profitability of manufacturing firms. JEL codes: D24; J23; J61; O15.

Rural and urban labour markets in developing countries are integrated by migration flows, which respond to earnings opportunities at origin and destination. This is the core of the celebrated Harris and Todaro (1970) model, which shows how in equilibrium, migration flows equate expected wages between rural and urban areas. One important implication of this model is that changes in rural employment opportunities will also impact urban labour markets via their effect on migration flows. My job market paper (Imbert and Papp 2014a) provides empirical evidence of this mechanism.

This paper provides some of the first empirical evidence on the role of internal migration in manufacturing growth, using Chinese data. We first identify shocks to rural livelihoods caused by variation in international agricultural prices and local climatic conditions. We then combine these shocks with a gravity model to predict yearly migrant inflow into each urban center. Finally, we use household survey data and a census of large firms to estimate the causal impact of migrant inflows on the urban economy. Preliminary results suggest that by increasing labor supply, migration lowers labor costs and increases the profitability of manufacturing firms. JEL codes: D24; J23; J61; O15.