This paper estimates the causal effect of rural-urban migration on urban production in China. We use longitudinal data on manufacturing firms between 2001 and 2006 and exploit exogenous variation in rural-urban migration due to agricultural price shocks. Following a migrant inflow, labor costs decline and employment expands. Labor productivity decreases sharply and remains low in the medium run. A quantitative framework suggests that destinations become too labor-abundant and migration mostly benefits low- productivity firms within locations. As migrants select into high-productivity destinations, migration however strongly contributes to the equalization of factor productivity across locations.

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 progre 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.

In contrast with the typical transition to a market economy, earnings inequality in Vietnam between 1993 and 2006 appears to have decreased, and the earnings gap in favor of public employees appears to have widened. The paper uses a comparative advantage model to disentangle the effect of sorting workers across sectors from the effect of the differences in returns to workers'skills. The selection of the best workers into the public sector is clearly an important component of the explanation for the public-private sector earnings gap, but the widening of this gap over time is primarily due to changes in the compensation patterns. The paper finds that, in the 1990s, public employees were underpaid compared with their earning potential in the private sector whereas, in the early 2000s, public employees earned similar returns to their comparative advantage in the public and private sectors. The increasing homogeneity in returns to skills in the Vietnamese labor market appears to explain both the increase in the public-private pay gap and the decrease in overall inequality.

We study the impact of deterrence, tax morale, and simplifying information on tax compliance. We ran five experiments spanning the tax process which varied the communication of the tax administration with all income taxpayers in Belgium. A consistent picture emerges across experiments: (i) simplifying communication increases compliance, (ii) deterrence messages have an additional positive effect, (iii) invoking tax morale is not effective. Even tax morale messages that improve knowledge and appreciation of public services do not raise compliance. In fact, heterogeneity analysis with causal forests shows that tax morale treatments backfire for most taxpayers. In contrast, simplification has large positive effects on compliance, which diminish over time due to follow-up enforcement. A discontinuity in enforcement intensity, combined with the experimental variation, allows us to compare simplification with standard enforcement measures. Simplification is far more cost-effective, allowing for substantial savings on enforcement costs, and also improves compliance in the next tax cycle.

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.