Published

• The political geography of cities (with C. Lessmann and P. Schaudt). AEJ Applied, 2026, doi: 10.1257/app.20230301.
• Connective financing: Chinese infrastructure projects and the diffusion of economic activity in developing countries (with A. Dreher,  A. Fuchs, B. Parks, A. Strange, and M. Tierney). CEPR Working Paper. Interactive feature. Blog post. China project data. Media coverage: VoxChina. Washington Post Monkey Cage. New York Times. National Public Radio (NPR). Brookings. CGD.   Journal of Urban Economics, Vol. 145, 103730, 2025. doi: 10.1016/j.jue.2024.103730
• Top lights: Bright cities and their contribution to economic development (with M. Krause). Journal of Development Economics, 102880, 2022. doi: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2022.102880
  
• What can we learn from nighttime lights for small geographies? Measurement errors and heterogeneous elasticities (with G. McCord). Remote Sensing, Vol. 14(5), 1190, 2022. doi: 10.3390/rs14051190
  
• Disparate air pollution reductions during California’s COVID-19 economic shutdown (with J. Burney, S. Benz, K. Hemes, M. Levy, P. Polonik, K. Ricke and L. Sanford). Nature Sustainability, 2022. doi: 10.1038/s41893-022-00856-1
• The spread of COVID-19 and the BCG vaccine: A natural experiment in reunified Germany (with M. Pinkovskiy). Blog post at Voxeu.org. Blog post at Liberty Street Economics. CEPR Covid Economics: Vetted and Real-Time Papers. Econometrics Journal, Vol. 24(3), 2021. Editor’s choice/Lead article. doi: 10.1093/ectj/utab006/
• Holding on? Ethnic divisions, political institutions and the duration of economic declines (with K. Thomsson). Journal of Development Economics, Vol. 144, 102457, 2020. doi: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2020.102457.
• Fueling conflict? (De)Escalation and bilateral aid (with M. Gassebner, P. Schaudt and S. Langlotz). Journal of Applied Econometrics, Vol. 32(2), 2020. doi: 10.1002/jae.2797.
• Do weak institutions prolong crises? On the identification, characteristics, and duration of declines during economic slumps (with D. de Crombrugghe and A. Szirmai), World Bank Economic Review, Vol. 34(3), 2020. doi: 10.1093/wber/lhz015.
• Poverty accounting (with D. de Crombrugghe and A. Szirmai), European Economic Review, Vol. 104, 2018. doi: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2018.03.003
  
• The dynamics of stagnation (with D. de Crombrugghe and A. Szirmai), Macroeconomic Dynamics, Vol. 20(8), 2016. doi: 10.1017/S1365100515000231

Under review or in revision

• Ethnofederalism: Subnational borders and the salience of ethnicity in politics (with R. Hodler and P. Schaudt).

Papers in preparation

• Regional majorities and comparative development (with R. Hodler and P. Schaudt).
• Rethinking redlining: Environmental inequality within and between U.S. neighborhoods (with L. Perdoni and J. Wichert).
• Independence Movements and Ethnic Politics: The Mau Mau Origins of Ethnic Voting and Distrust in Kenya (with G. Asmus and T. Korn).
• Using CNNs to study the effects of settlement schemes on housing conditions in Kenya (with L. Sanford)

Miscellaneous

• fhetprob: A fast QMLE Stata routine for fractional probit models with multiplicative heteroskedasticity, retired background paper

Policy reports

• Income inequality and poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa (with D. de Crombrugghe and A. Fosu). 2016.  EU – DG DEVCO report.
• Poor trends: The pace of poverty reduction after the Millennium Development Agenda (with D. de Crombrugghe and A. Szirmai). In: Haddad, L., Kato, H., & Meisel, N. (2015). Growth is Dead, Long Live Growth: The Quality of Economic Growth and Why it Matters. Agence Française de Développement (AFD), Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Tokyo, Japan.