Students in India who cheat on a simple laboratory task are more likely to prefer public sector jobs. This paper shows that cheating on this task predicts corrupt behavior by civil servants, implying that it is a meaningful predictor of future corruption. Students who demonstrate pro-social preferences are less likely to prefer government jobs, while outcomes on an explicit game and attitudinal measures to measure corruption do not systematically predict job preferences. A screening process that chooses high-ability applicants would not alter the average propensity for corruption. The findings imply that differential selection into government may contribute, in part, to corruption. (JEL C91, D12, D73, H83, K42, O12, O17)

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This paper examines the impact of a property rights reform in rural China that allowed farmers to lease out their land. We find the reform led to increases in land rental activity in rural households. Our results indicate that the formalization of leasing rights resulted in a redistribution of land toward more productive farmers. Consequently, output and aggregate productivity increased by 8 and 10%, respectively. We also find that the reform increased the responsiveness of land allocation across crops to changes in crop prices.

Many recent papers have studied movements in stock, bond, and currency prices over short windows of time around macro announcements. This paper adds to the announcement effects literature in two ways. First, we study the joint announcement effects across a broad range of assets-exchange rates and U.S. and foreign term structures. In order to evaluate whether the joint effects can be reconciled with conventional theory, we interpret the joint movements in light of uncovered interest rate parity or changes in risk premia. For several real macro announcements, we find that a stronger than expected release appreciates the dollar today, but that it must either (i) lower the relative risk premium for holding foreign currency rather than dollars, or (ii) imply considerable future expected dollar depreciation. The latter implies an overshooting behavior akin to that described by Dornbusch (1976). Second, we use a longer span of high frequency data than has been common in announcement work. A longer span of high frequency data contributes to the precision of our estimates and allows us to explore the possibility that the effects of macro surprises on asset prices have varied over time. We find evidence, for example, that PPI releases had a larger effect on U.S. interest rates before about 1992 than subsequently.

This paper exploits a unique feature of China’s history, the “sent-down youth” (SDY ) program, to study the effects of access to internal migration. We show that temporary migration due to the SDY program created lasting inter-province links. We interact these links with two time-varying pull measures in potential destinations. Decades after the SDY program ended, increased access to migration in cities that sent SDY leads to higher rates of migration from provinces where those SDY temporarily resided. We find that improved access to migration leads to lower consumption volatility and lower asset holding. Furthermore, household production shifts into high-risk, high-return activities. (JEL D13, J24, O15, O18, P25, P36, R23)