Tri-Anh Duc Nguyen

Abstract to be added.

While return migration’s positive economic effects are well-documented, its impact on crime and conflict remains understudied. We examine return migrant effects on crime and conflict in rural Thailand using panel data from 110 subdistricts across three north-eastern provinces (2010–2022). Employing three-stage least squares with weighted-distance unemployment rates as an instrumental variable, we find significant effects on conflict, specifically business fraud, but no evidence for property crime effects or neighbour conflicts. Business fraud effects increase consistently and persist up to nine months upon return. Our findings suggest that while return migrants contribute to local economies through acquired social, financial, and human capital, positive effects can be severely offset by business fraud without proper reintegration policies.

U.S. monetary policy influences housing markets worldwide, yet the literature estimating its spillovers conflate two opposing forces within each Federal Reserve announcement. We decompose Fed policy-rate announcements into pure monetary policy shocks and information shocks following Bu, Rogers, and Wu (2021) and estimate their effects on real house price indices using Jordà (2005) local projections in a panel of nine emerging economies between 2005 and 2019. A pure tightening shock depresses housing prices significantly from three quarters onward, and the contractionary effect grows over six consecutive quarters. In contrast, the information shocks raise housing prices within one quarter as markets update expectations about global activity. The two effects partially offset and reduces the net transmission of U.S. rate changes to emerging-market housing below previously reported estimates. Capital controls implemented by emerging economies attenuate both channels. Countries exercising tighter controls experience significantly smaller spillovers. The pure monetary policy results are robust to alternative shock measures from Jarocinski and Karadi (2020). However, the information effect is shorter-lived under the alternative measures.

Climate change threatens developing countries, but credible evidence linking extreme weather to conflict through farm income remains scarce. We isolate the income channel using a triple-difference design and over 80,000 cell-month observations in Vietnam between 2010 and 2024. Extreme drought during the rice harvest raises organized violence in farming communities. We conduct mechanism tests to distinguish whether weather causes conflict by destroying harvests, by raising temperatures that increase aggression, or by creating opportunities for predation during disorder. Our results rule out heat-driven aggression, opportunistic predation, and temporal displacement as alternative explanations to our income channel. Drought-driven conflict dissipates across space but persists over time. The weather-conflict link weakens where irrigation protects farm income. Our result extends the income channel to a low-conflict setting and suggests stabilizing farm income during drought as a targeted, actionable lever for conflict prevention in agricultural economies.

Whether rural households benefit from nearby urbanization through commuting alone matters for structural transformation in developing countries. We combine three waves (2019–2024) of a longitudinal household panel with nighttime-light imagery to measure each household's exposure to nearby urbanization. Urban economic expansion raises off-farm employment, income, and education investment among rural Vietnamese households. The urbanization effects increases in the number of the nearest urban centers. Proxied for the ability to find jobs in urban centers, asset wealth and motorcycle ownership determine who benefits most of the gains. Instrumenting off-farm participation, we find that entering off-farm work substantially raises per-child education spending and triples the education budget share. The households that were spending the least on education gain the most, narrowing gaps in human capital investment across families. Off-farm labor markets linked to nearby urban growth reduce education inequality through local commuting.

Abstract to be added.

Abstract to be added.

Rural households in developing countries face natural hazards but often lack timely information about them. We estimate how information and communication technology adoption shapes risk perception of floods, droughts, storms, disease, and landslides among rural Vietnamese households. Using a longitudinal household survey data from 2012 to 2022 and a simultaneous three-equation system with Heckman selection and an instrumental variable, we find that ICT adoption raises the probability of reporting any expected risk by a sizable amount across five hazard categories. The effect operates on the extensive margin. ICT moves households from perceiving no risk to perceiving some. It does not shift how high-risk households rate the severity of hazards they already recognize. Controlling for lifetime flood exposure absorbs the ICT effect for floods but not for storms. ICT matters most where households lack direct experience with a hazard.