Temporary overseas work can both raise a family's income and split the household geographically, with theoretically ambiguous net effects on spending, finance, and labor supply decisions. We study a policy discontinuity in the Philippines that quasi-randomly assigned temporary, partial-household migration for high-wage jobs inKorea. This allows quasiexperimental estimates of reduced-form effects of migration. We find that migration causes large changes in households' spending and saving—not only through remittances but also migration-induced shifts in household decision-making power. Migration does not reduce labor supply by nonmigrants. Common nonexperimental estimators would have been subject to substantial selection bias in this setting.

We investigate how urban railroad and highway configurations have influenced urban form in Chinese cities since 1990. Each radial highway displaces 4% of central city population to surrounding regions, and ring roads displace about an additional 20%, with stronger effects in the richer coastal and central regions. Each radial railroad reduces central city industrial GDP by about 20%, with ring roads displacing an additional 50%. We provide evidence that radial highways decentralize service sector activity, radial railroads decentralize industrial activity, and ring roads decentralize both. Historical transportation infrastructure provides identifying variation in more recent measures of infrastructure.