Essays in development economics and labor economics

This dissertation consists of three essays in Development Economics and Labor Economics.;The first essay uses data from Brazilian industrial plants to estimate the extent to which employment spillovers between geographically and economically proximate industries lead to larger changes in employment than would be predicted by national trends in Brazilian municipalities. Using establishment-level data from Brazil, we estimate the extent to which firm- and industry-level employment and entry decisions respond to plausibly exogenous changes in the employment decisions of geographically and economically proximate firms between 1995 and 2005 Our results suggest the existence of economically and statistically significant effects of municipality-level predicted trends in other industries on the employment and entry decisions of individual firms.;The second chapter estimates the impact of changes in state statutes, which in addition to laws passed at the federal level in the United States, specify procedures for summoning and determining the eligibility of jurors to serve on criminal juries in state courts. This paper uses a series of changes in state laws governing the compilation of lists of eligible jurors to attempt to identify the impact of increasing the participation of African Americans and other minorities in jury service on the racial composition of admissions to prison. Evidence exploiting the variation in timing of these law changes suggests that the reforms resulted in a 5 to 6 percentage point drop in the share of new admissions to prison accounted for by non-whites, consistent with the existence of racial discrimination in the deliberation of criminal cases;The third chapter uses original survey data as well as administrative data on sales from a distributor for a large multinational firm producing household goods to estimate the returns to additional investments made by small retail establishments in western Kenya. Standard textbook models suggest risk-adjusted rates of return should be equalized across activities within firms, and across firms. We find unexploited investments in inventory which would yield an average annual real marginal rate of return of 113 percent, well above rates of return to debt and equity both in Kenya and in international markets. A second approach, using administrative data on whether firms purchased enough to take advantage of quantity discounts from wholesalers, suggests a lower bound on rates of return of at least 117 percent per year. We reject the hypothesis that the marginal rates of return are equal across shops.