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We complement the literature on distributive politics by taking a systematic look at regional favoritism in a large and diverse sample of countries and by employing a broad measure that captures the aggregate distributive effect of many different policies. In particular, we use satellite data on nighttime light intensity and information about the birthplaces of the countries’ political leaders. In our panel of 38,427 subnational regions from 126 countries with yearly observations from 1992 to 2009, we find that subnational regions have more intense nighttime light when being the birth region of the current political leader. We argue that this finding provides evidence for regional favoritism. We explore the dynamics and the geographical extent of regional favoritism and show that regional favoritism is most prevalent in countries with weak political institutions and poorly educated citizens. Furthermore, foreign aid inflows and oil rents tend to fuel regional favoritism in weakly institutionalized countries, but not elsewhere.

Consumer bankruptcy is one of the largest social insurance programs in the United States, but little is known about its impact on debtors. We use 500,000 bankruptcy filings matched to administrative tax and foreclosure data to estimate the impact of Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection on subsequent outcomes. Exploiting the random assignment of bankruptcy filings to judges, we find that Chapter 13 protection increases annual earnings by $5,562, decreases five-year mortality by 1.2 percentage points, and decreases five-year foreclosure rates by 19.1 percentage points. These results come primarily from the deterioration of outcomes among dismissed filers, not gains by granted filers.

Using the historical random assignment of MBA students to sections at Harvard Business School (HBS), I explore how executive peer networks can affect managerial decision making. Within an HBS class, firm outcomes are significantly more similar among graduates from the same section than among graduates from different sections, with the strongest effects in executive compensation and acquisitions strategy. I demonstrate the role of ongoing social interactions by showing that peer effects are more than twice as strong in the year following staggered alumni reunions. Supplementary tests suggest that peer influence can operate in ways that do not contribute to firm productivity.

I use U.S. Census microdata to analyze the effect of stronger creditor rights on productivity. Following the adoption of antirecharacterization laws that give lenders greater access to the collateral of firms in financial distress, treated plants’total factor productivity increases by 2.6%. This effect is concentrated among plants belonging to financially constrained firms. I explore the underlying mechanism and find that treated plants change the composition of their investments and their workforce toward newer capital and skilled labor. My results suggest that stronger creditor rights relax borrowing constraints and help firms adopt more efficient production technologies.

This paper examines the impact of regulatory reform on productivity growth and its components for Indian banks from 1992 to 2009. We estimate parametric and nonparametric efficiency frontiers, followed by Divisia and Malmquist indexes of total factor productivity, respectively. To account for technology heterogeneity among ownership types, we use a metafrontier approach. Results are consistent across methodologies and show sustained productivity growth, driven mainly by technological progress. Furthermore, results indicate that different ownership types react differently to changes in the operating environment. The position of foreign banks becomes increasingly dominant, and their production technology becomes the best practice in the industry.

This paper examines the transmission of human capital from parents to children using variation in parental influence due to parental death, divorce, and the increasing specialization of parental roles in larger families. All three sources of variation yield strikingly similar patterns that show that the strong parent-child correlation in human capital is largely causal. In each case, the parent-child correlation in education is stronger with the parent who spends more time with the child and weaker with the parent who spends relatively less time parenting. These findings help us understand why educated parents spend more time with their children.

In this paper, we empirically investigate the impact of the Kyoto Protocol on CO2 emissions using a sample of 170 countries over the period 1992–2009. We propose the use of a difference-in-differences estimator with matching to address the endogeneity of the policy variable, namely Kyoto commitments. Countries are matched according to observable characteristics to create a suitable counterfactual. We correspondingly estimate a panel data model for the whole sample and the matched sample and compare the results to those obtained using an instrumental variable approach. The main results indicate that Kyoto Protocol commitments have a measurable reducing effect on CO2 emissions, indicating that a treaty often deemed a ‘failure’ may in fact be producing some non-negligible effects for those who signed it.

I estimate the effect of international migration on the human capital of children in the migrants’ origin country. Using administrative data containing all migrant departures from the Philippines, I exploit variation across provinces in destination-country demand for migrants. My estimates are at the local labor market level, allowing for spillovers to nonmigrant households. An average year-to-year percent increase in migration causes a 3.5 percent increase in secondary school enrollment. The effects are likely driven by increased income rather than an increased expected wage premium for education.

This article investigates scale economies and the optimal scale of pension funds, estimating different cost functions with varying assumptions about the shape of the underlying average cost function: U-shaped versus monotonically declining. Using unique data for Dutch pension funds over 1992–2009, we find that unused scale economies for both administrative activities are indeed large and concave, that is, huge for small pension funds and decreasing with pension fund size. We observe a clear optimal scale of around 40,000 participants during 1992–2000 (pointing to a U-shaped average cost function), which increases in subsequent years to size above the largest pension fund, pointing to monotonically decreasing average costs. These model-based outcomes are roughly in line with the results of a survivorship analysis.