This paper aims to explain why over the past two decades in Chile internal rural–urban migration has not worked as an effective equalizing mechanism for territorial income disparities. In view of this aim, we investigate how labor market incentives and non-market barriers structurally affect migration. Based on national household surveys, our empirical strategy controls for the self-selection of working migrants, allowing the estimation of a non-endogenous earnings differential while relying on a consistent poverty identification at the origin.

I develop a theory to study the determination of land rights in precolonial Vietnam, in which the state uses restrictive land rights to tie landless peasants to their land, in order to collect head taxes and enforce unpaid labor services and military conscription.

Abstract