Foreign Direct Investment and Local Productivity Spillovers: Evidence from Indonesia (Job Market Paper)
In this paper, I identify and quantify local spillovers using a rich dataset of Indonesian manufacturing firms with granular location information. Within local clusters of manufacturing employment, I find an elasticity of domestic firm productivity with respect to the average quality of domestic neighbors of 0.025, and an elasticity of domestic firm productivity with respect to the average quality of foreign neighbors of 0.002. For foreign-owned firms, I find little evidence of productivity spillovers from peers of either ownership type. A simple policy simulation indicates that areas of lower manufacturing density gain the most on average from a new high-productivity peer.
Urban Sprawl and Residential Carbon Emissions: Evidence from Indonesia and the Philippines [paper]
(with Yi Jiang, Alex Rothenberg, and Yao Wang)
This paper uses detailed data from cities in Indonesia and the Philippines to study how variation in density within urban areas affects residential carbon emissions. To address simultaneity, we instrument density with soil characteristics, and to address sorting, we control for community averages of observed characteristics. Unlike cities in developed countries, we find that density is positively correlated with residential energy use. After controlling for sorting, we find that increasing density does not reduce residential carbon emissions. Our results suggest that policies to control urban sprawl may not be successful in reducing residential carbon emissions in developing country cities.