This paper estimates people’s taste for living with own-ethnic-group neighbors using variation from a natural experiment in Singapore: ethnic housing quotas. I develop a location choice model that informs the use of policy variation from the quotas to address endogeneity issues well-known in the social interactions literature. I assembled a dataset on neighborhood level ethnic proportions by matching more than 500,000 names in the phonebook to ethnicities. I find that all groups want to live with some own-ethnic-group neighbors but they also exhibit inverted U-shaped preferences so that once a neighborhood has enough own-ethnic-neighbors, they would rather add a new neighbor from other groups. Welfare simulations show that about 30% of the neighborhoods are within one standard deviation of the first best allocation of ethnic groups.

Self‐dealing is potentially important but difficult to measure. In this paper, I study special servicers in commercial mortgage‐backed securities (CMBS), which sell distressed assets on behalf of bondholders. Around 2010, ownership changes of four major servicers raised concerns that they may direct benefits to new owners' affiliates (buyers and service providers). Loans liquidated after ownership changes have greater loss rates than before (8 percentage points (p.p.), $2.3 billion in losses), relative to other (placebo) servicers. Together with a case study that tracks self‐dealing purchases, the findings point to potential steering conflicts that could incentivize tunneling through fees to service providers.

Developing countries face massive urbanization and slum upgrading is a popular policy to improve shelter for many. Yet, preserving slums at the expense of formal developments can raise concerns of misallocation of land. We estimate causal, long-term impacts of the 1969–84 KIP programme, which provided basic upgrades to 5 million residents covering 25% of land in Jakarta, Indonesia. We assemble high-resolution data on programme boundaries and 2015 outcomes and address programme selection bias through localized comparisons. On average, KIP areas today have lower land values, shorter buildings, and are more informal, per a photographs-based slum index. The negative effects are concentrated within 5 km of the CBD. We develop a spatial equilibrium model to characterize the welfare implications of KIP. Counterfactuals suggest that 79% of the welfare effects stem from removing KIP in the centre and highlight how to mitigate losses to displaced residents.

We use a population resettlement program in Indonesia to identify long-run effects of intergroup contact on national integration. In the 1980s, the government relocated two million ethnically diverse migrants into hundreds of new communities. We find greater integration in fractionalized communities with many small groups, as measured by national language use at home, intermarriage, and children’s name choices. However, in polarized communities with a few large groups, ethnic attachment increases and integration declines. Residential segregation dampens these effects. Social capital, public goods, and ethnic conflict follow similar patterns. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of localized contact in shaping identity.

We use a natural experiment in Indonesia to provide causal evidence on the role of location-specific human capital and skill transferability in shaping the spatial distribution of productivity. From 1979–1988, the Transmigration Program relocated two million migrants from rural Java and Bali to new rural settlements in the Outer Islands. Villages assigned migrants from regions with more similar agroclimatic endowments exhibit higher rice productivity and nighttime light intensity one to two decades later. We find some evidence of migrants' adaptation to agroclimatic change. Overall, our results suggest that regional productivity differences may overstate the potential gains from migration.