Lakes are central to global development, yet their economic role remains poorly understood even though 40% of the world’s population lives near them. The shrinkage of Lake Chad between 1963 and 1990 provides a rare opportunity to examine how lake recession shapes regional economies. Using novel historical data from the 1940s to the 2010s for Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and Niger, the analysis shows that areas near the lake grew more slowly. Declines in fishing, herding, and farming outweighed the benefits of newly exposed land. A dynamic quantitative spatial model allows us to capture non-local effects, identify mechanisms, and evaluate policies to restore Lake Chad. 

This paper explores how unexpected fertility shocks may influence human capital formation through changes in both family composition and educational environments. I use the 2015–2016 Zika epidemic in Brazil as a natural experiment. After the discovery that Zika infection during pregnancy could cause severe birth defects, fertility declined sharply, particularly among older and more educated women. Using administrative data and a difference-in-differences framework, I estimate that births in the epidemic’s epicenter fell by roughly 6.6 percent relative to the rest of Brazil. The smaller cohorts that followed entered schools with fewer students per class, yet early literacy outcomes for these children appear slightly lower. Instrumental-variable estimates suggest that negative selection into parenthood may have outweighed any gains from smaller class sizes. The findings suggest that even short-lived fertility shocks may leave enduring imprints on human capital accumulation.

Using census data for 7,000 cities, covering three-fourths of the world’s urban population, we classify cities as production, consumption, or neutral, depending on their employment shares in tradable and non-tradable sectors. Developing nations may urbanize through different paths: production cities emerge from industrialization or tradable services, while consumption cities arise from resource exports or premature deindustrialization. Evidence shows that consumption cities offer weaker growth prospects, limiting the role of urbanization as "engines of growth". Understanding how sectoral structure mediates the urbanization-growth relationship and how consumption cities become production cities is thus highly relevant for policy.

High temperatures reduce workers’ on-the-job productivity and increase absenteeism, generating significant economic losses. These impacts are expected to intensify under climate change, especially in low- and middle-income countries where exposure to heat is already high and access to climate control at work is limited. This paper synthesizes both economic and non-economic literature on the relationship between heat and labor productivity. The goal is to consolidate empirical evidence and derive a set of elasticities that quantify the response of labor outcomes to temperature changes, providing a useful resource for researchers modeling the economic impacts of climate change.

This paper explores whether the occurrence of salient natural disasters elsewhere can modify risk perceptions among populations vulnerable to similar shocks. I use Australia's 2009 Black Saturday bushfires as a natural experiment. The fires, which caused 173 fatalities and displaced over 7,500 people, rank among the most devastating natural disasters in the country’s recent history. I test whether Black Saturday changed risk expectations and behavior in other fire-prone areas across Australia. To do so I combine geospatial data on historical fires and estimated fire risk with indicators of local economic activity including income, nightlights and built volume. The objective of the paper is to test whether communities in high-risk areas exhibited changes consistent with revised beliefs about climate disasters likelihood and severity.

This paper investigates how transient, unexpected fertility shocks can influence women’s labor market behavior in the short and medium term. I exploit the 2015–2016 Zika epidemic in Brazil as a natural experiment. The epidemic represented the first documented case in which infection during pregnancy was causally linked to birth defects, a discovery that led to a substantial drop in birthrates. Using administrative birth records, household surveys, and firm-level employment data, I examine how women’s labor supply, occupational allocation, and employment trajectories responded during and after the epidemic. Although the heightened risk of infection was transitory, fertility rates did not return to pre-epidemic levels, suggesting that many women did not realize previously postponed fertility intentions. This persistent decline raises the possibility that Zika induced a lasting shift in fertility preferences for some women. I further explore whether medium-term labor market outcomes help explain this enduring demographic response.