Despite the need for transportation infrastructure investments in developing cities, empirical evidence on their net returns is lacking due to data constraints and the common oversight of land acquisition costs. In this paper, I collect novel data to estimate the net returns of 140 km of road improvements in Kampala, Uganda, since 2017, accounting for both benefits and land acquisition costs. I conduct two surveys with real estate brokers and landowners and I exploit variation in the timing of improvements to estimate the local benefits. I then develop a quantitative spatial model to capture the city-level impacts of the policy, accounting for general equilibrium effects and heterogeneous land acquisition costs. Leveraging the coexistence of three property rights regimes in the city, I show that weak property rights are associated with lower land acquisition costs. I find that the net welfare gains from the realized road improvements were equivalent to a $119 transfer per resident, but would have been negative if land had been acquired at market value, as legally mandated under eminent domain, due to the high cost of raising domestic funds. Finally, I solve for the optimal road improvements under different institutional settings and demonstrate the importance of accounting for land costs when designing, funding, and evaluating transportation infrastructure projects, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where land acquisition relies on fragile land and financial institutions.

Despite the enormous costs of air pollution, willingness-to-pay (WTP) for clean air in polluted developing contexts remains low. We posit one understudied reason is that clean air is an experience good, whose value is revealed after consumption. We test this using a cluster-randomized trial, and seek to document an “experience wedge”, i.e. a difference between anticipated and realized utility of consuming a good. We deploy a novel experience-based intervention, installing air monitors and purifiers, potentially a more salient treatment than traditional information in pamphlets or videos. To explore the mechanisms behind the hypothesized wedge, we implement a purifier-only treatment to distinguish between (1) knowledge about objective pollution exposure and (2) the sensory experience of breathing in clean air. This will be the first experimental evidence demonstrating how experience can shift demand for clean air, with implications for public health policy, environmental awareness campaigns, and using WTP estimates in economic evaluations.

Air pollution within African cities is high but unevenly distributed. In principle, individuals could mitigate the severe health risk by working in the less polluted parts of the city. In practice, we show that pollution avoidance is challenging because firms locate on the busiest and most polluted roads searching for customer visibility. Both workers and entrepreneurs bear the cost of this pollution exposure, but the benefits are unequally distributed: profits are much higher in polluted areas, while compensating differentials in wages are minimal. An information experiment reveals limited awareness of pollution, suggesting that workers might be undercompensated for their exposure.

Exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) poses major health risks, especially in rapidly urbanizing cities. As urbanization accelerates, people in low- and middle-income countries spend more time indoors, where pol We present evidence from over 152,000 monitor-hours of indoor PM2.5 measurements across homes in Jakarta, Indonesia, one of the world’s largest and most polluted cities. We find that mean daily indoor and outdoor PM2.5 levels are both dangerously high, eight times above World Health Organization’s (WHO) health-based guidelines. In addition, indoor PM2.5 frequently reach hazardous levels—40 to 100 times the WHO guideline, levels that outdoor monitors do not capture. Unlike in developed settings, most indoor pollution originates from outdoor infiltration. Survey data also reveal large inequalities: lower-income households experience double the mean indoor PM2.5 of higher-income households. Our findings show that indoor air pollution remains both severe and unequally distributed, even in this population where most people have adopted cleaner cooking fuels. Researchers and policymakers should integrate outdoor air quality mapping with demographically representative indoor monitoring to close key data gaps, enabling more accurate exposure estimates and better-targeted environmental health policies.

Transportation infrastructure determines a location's accessibility and, in turn, is a key driver of demographic and economic distributions across space. Investments and dis-investments in this infrastructure are common, but the impacts of contractionary transportation policies have not been extensively studied. Using a simple modification of the standard quantitative spatial model, I theorize that while positive accessibility changes to a location result in rapid population adjustment, negative changes may create a slow and asymmetric population adjustment due to the presence of slowly depreciating housing capital. This paper provides empirical support for the existence of these non-linear responses by studying the impact of the closure of more than one half of the French railroad between 1930 and 1960. I find that, within a given county, municipalities hit one-standard deviation harder by the policy had a 7 percent lower population growth between 1926 and 1982. This response is slow, strongest between two and four decades after the policy, and is non-linear in the short run: it is systematically lower when estimated on market access decrease than it is for (relative) market access increase.