Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. We investigate the prevalence and determinants of ethnic favoritism, i.e., preferential public policies targeted at the political leader's ethnic group. We construct a panel dataset of 2,022 ethnographic regions from 139 countries with annual observations from 1992 to 2012, and use nighttime light intensity as output measure to capture the distributive effects of a wide range of policies. We find robust evidence for ethnic favoritism: the political leaders' ethnographic regions enjoy 10% higher nighttime light intensity. We further find that ethnic favoritism is a global rather than Sub-Saharan African phenomenon, which is present in poor as well as rich countries; that political institutions have a weak effect on ethnic favoritism; that ethnic favoritism is most prevalent in ethnically fractionalized and segregated countries with long established polities; and that ethnic favoritism does not contribute to sustainable development. Terms of use: Documents inJEL-Code: D720, R110, J150, O430.

In this paper we ask whether there is a relationship between land property rights and international migration. In order to identify the impact of property rights, we consider a country-wide land certi…cation program that took place in Mexico in the 1990s. Our identi…cation strategy exploits the timing of the program and the heterogeneity in farmers' eligibility for the program. Comparing eligible and ineligible households, we …nd that the program increased the likelihood of having one or more members abroad by 12 percent. In terms of number of migrants, our coe¢ cient estimates explain 31 percent of the 1994-1997 increase in migrants from ejido areas and 16-18 percent of the increase from the entire Mexico. We contribute to the current debate on the determinants of Mexican emigration (Hanson 2006, Hanson and McIntosh 2009, Hanson and McIntosh 2010. Consistent with our theoretical model, the impact is strongest for households without a land will.

Do internal migration networks benefit or harm their home communities in case of a communicable disease? Looking at the spread of Covid in Italy and using pre-determined province-to-province migration, excess mortality and mobile phone tracking data, we document that provinces with a greater share of migrants in outbreak areas show greater compliance with self-isolation measures (information mechanism), but also a greater population inflow from outbreak areas (carrier mechanism). For a subset of localities, the net effect on mortality is negative . However, for the average locality, the effect is positive and large, suggesting that the role of migrants as information providers is trumped by their role as virus carriers. The effect is quantitatively important and could be incorporated in epidemiological models forecasting the spread of communicable diseases.

We analyze the impact of a natural experiment in Indonesia that allocated certain district governments with a windfall revenue from natural resource production. Our identi…cation is based on a comparison between bordering districts in provinces that received the windfall with those that did not receive it, before and after the …scal reform in 1999. We study the impact on a range of outcome variables such as regional GDP, infrastructure quality, employment, education, and household consumption. Our results demonstrate a " ‡ypaper e¤ect" in the sense that the increased revenue led to higher spending without any lowering of local taxes.We argue that the large relative increases in spending on public services contributed to a very strong increase in local GDP levels, led by the agricultural sector. A 100-dollar windfall further increased literacy by about 2 percent and non-food consumption by 67 USD. The strong general tendency of positive e¤ects from the reform stands in contrast to the negative e¤ects emphasized in the resource curse literature.

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