Ongoing research

1.  Produce at Home! Trade Disruption and Domestic Supply 

How do economies adjust when access to an established foreign supplier is disrupted? I address this question by combining transaction-level customs records with administrative VAT data from Rwanda. Leveraging the 2019 Rwanda--Uganda border closure and pre-existing differences in products' dependence on Ugandan supply, I find that (i) Uganda-origin imports collapse in more exposed product markets; (ii) imports from alternative foreign suppliers increase, particularly from Kenya and Tanzania, but do not fully offset the lost supply; and (iii) domestic production does not expand in more exposed markets, even among firms with greater pre-existing specialization in the affected products. The limited domestic response is also present among producers without direct pre-closure imports from Uganda. The findings suggest that, in this setting, adjustment to a major foreign supply disruption occurred primarily through reallocation across foreign suppliers rather than expansion of domestic production. Working paper, coming soon!!

2.  Gender, Merit, and the State: Evidence from Public-Sector Recruitment in Rwanda 

Can merit-based recruitment narrow gender differences in access to public employment? We study this question using the universe of more than six million applications to public-sector vacancies in Rwanda, linked to longitudinal government payroll records. The granularity of the data allows us to follow candidates from application through written and oral assessments to job offers and subsequent public employment. We first show that aggregate gender differences partly reflect sorting across vacancies: among candidates who pass the written examination, women are less likely than men to reach the oral stage in the raw data, but this relationship reverses within vacancies and remains positive after conditioning on written performance. We then exploit the 50-percent written-examination threshold to compare candidates with similar performance on opposite sides of the cutoff. Crossing the threshold increases oral progression by 19.7 percentage points and job offers by 5.5 percentage points, but the increase in oral progression is 4.9 percentage points smaller for women. Combining recruitment to the payroll further shows that crossing the threshold increases realized public employment among applicants previously outside government. Together, the results show that gender differences in merit-based recruitment reflect both sorting across jobs and differential progression across stages, rather than a single aggregate hiring gap. Working paper, coming soon!!

3.   Origins of Large Firms: Evidence from Emerging and Developing Economies

4. Life Cycle of Firms and Access to Finance in Developing Countries

5. Managers and Allocation of Talent in the Public Sector