Many eligible families fail to apply for social programs due to multiple frictions such as information constraints and application complexity. This study evaluates a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) testing interventions to increase take-up of the 25% reservation for disadvantaged children in private schools under India's Right to Education (RTE) Act. Conducted across urban and rural areas in Chhattisgarh, the experiment evaluates the effects of information provision and application assistance --- both independently and in combination.

This paper investigates the impact of resource booms on export value, concentration, composition, and sophistication in resource-rich developing economies. Using a shift-share instrument that leverages heterogeneous exposure to Chinese demand after China’s 2001 WTO accession and the ex-ante composition of export baskets, I examine the causal effects on export baskets and sectoral employment of Brazilian local economies.

This paper examines whether female leadership can reduce violence in the context of the Colombian conflict. To identify the effect, I leverage closely contested local elections between male and female candidates, alongside a novel dataset with the location and gender of guerrilla unit commanders. I find that female leadership has a negative effect on conflict violence that amounts to a 60% reduction in the most demanding specification.

This paper examines the impact of the Rehabilitation & Reintegration initiative, a prison-based job training and skills development program, on recidivism, labor market, and social outcomes. I use a difference-in-differences strategy to assess the causal impact of the program, introduced in the Netherlands in 2007. Drawing on rich administrative data from Statistics Netherlands and the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, I find that prisoners eligible in the program are 4.5 percentage points (14%) less likely to reoffend over a period of three years.

The transport sector is the backbone of international trade and has faced multiple disruptions in recent years. I study the substitutability between different transport modes and how mode-specific trade cost shocks affect international trade flows. I use the closure of Russian airspace in 2022 as an exogenous change in transport costs to provide novel estimates of the elasticity of substitution between transport modes. To quantify the importance of this margin of adjustment in equilibrium, I develop a Ricardian model of international trade with multiple transport modes.

Youth clubs are community-based after-school programmes, typically offeredfree of charge to teenagers in underprivileged neighbourhoods. I provide the firstcausal estimates of their effects on education and crime, leveragingquasi-experimental variation from austerity-related cuts, which led to the closureof 30% of youth clubs in London between 2010 and 2019. I usedifference-in-differences research designs and novel data to compareneighbourhoods affected by closures with those unaffected. Teenagers in areasaffected performed nearly 4% worse in national high-school exams.

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This paper investigates communication with multiple, identically informed Senders with a single, uninformed Receiver. Players have common interests, the state space is infinite, and Senders’ message spaces are finite. Thus, while players prefer full information revelation, their language does not allow for it. Efficient communication requires Senders to use language heterogeneously, assigning non-convex meanings to individual messages, while ensuring that message profiles convey convex information.