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  Essay I: Does rural to urban migration in developing countries improve the opportunities available to children? And does childhood urban exposure increase educational attainment? Using census data for 14 African countries combined with an age-at-move design, I show that childhood exposure to cities significantly raises primary school completion, school attendance, and literacy rates. The increase in educational attainment is robust to the inclusion of household fixed effects, visible in all subgroups and countries, and particularly large for girls. The paper hence provides evidence of a channel through which urbanization can stimulate economic growth in developing countries, even in the absence of structural transformation.

  Essay II: Despite the large urban-rural income gap across the developing world, it remains unclear to what degree this reflects the causal effect of urban residency. This paper presents new evidence by investigating the effect of urban residency during childhood on economic outcomes in adulthood. Causal identification is obtained from an age-at-move design combined with high-quality Brazilian census data. The analysis shows that spending childhood in an environment one log-point denser increases adulthood earnings and wages by 2 - 3 percent. Around half of this effect is due to an increase in educational attainment. The findings suggest that the previous literature, by exclusively focusing on urban exposure during adulthood, has underestimated the causal effect of urban residency on earnings by 50%.

  Essay III: Despite a large urban-rural education gap in many countries, little attention has been paid to whether cities enjoy a comparative advantage in the production of human capital. Using Dutch administrative data, this paper finds that conditional on family characteristics and highly predictive measures of cognitive ability, children who grow up in urban regions consistently attain higher levels of human capital compared to children in rural regions. The elasticity of university attendance w.r.t. density is 0.07, which is robust across a wide variety of specifications. Hence, the paper highlights an alternative channel to explain the rise of the city.

  Essay IV (with Niklas Bengtsson and Adrian Poignant): Industrialization is a ubiquitous feature of economic development, but the consequences for workers remain poorly understood. In this paper, we study the effects of worker displacement during the second industrial revolution in the Swedish iron industry. Using linked census data and a novel data source on production, we find that displaced ironworkers were 23 pp more likely to exit the industry, 25 pp more likely to migrate internally and lost 10% of their earnings relative to other workers. While the displacement effects persist over time for workers, we find no evidence of spillovers on their children.

Despite the large urban–rural education gap observed in most countries, little attention has been paid to whether cities actually enjoy a comparative advantage in the production of human capital. Using Dutch administrative data, this paper finds that children growing in urban regions consistently attain higher levels of human capital compared with children in rural regions, conditional on observed cognitive ability and various family characteristics. The elasticity of university attendance with respect to population density is 0.07, which is robust across a variety of specifications. Hence, the paper offers a different explanation to explain the recent success of cities.

According to the Melitz [2003. 'The Impact of Trade on Intra-Industry Reallocations and Aggregate Industry Productivity.' Econometrica 71: 1695-1725] model, potential exporters have to be sufficiently productive to overcome the entry costs of foreign markets. Once firms pass this productivity threshold, they all export. However, empirical evidence indicates that a substantial share of highly productive top-performing firms does not export. In this paper, we focus specifically on this group of high-performing non-exporters and identify the factors that prevent them from successfully exporting. We employ a large Dutch administrative dataset containing both small and large firms in services and manufacturing for the period 2010-2016. Our main findings are two-fold. First, controlling for high productivity identifies other factors that need to be fulfilled for exporting firms. Firm size, import status, and foreign ownership are important determinants of a firm's future export activity. Second, firm location is crucial. A location in more peripheral areas increases the probability that high-productive firms do not export, whereas a location close to the border increases export probabilities.

Infrastructure projects increasing aim at to improve the quality of life and public space, in particular in urban areas. We analyse a Dutch case in which an existing highway in an urban area was moved underground in order to improve intercity traffic flows and to reduce the negative effects associated with an open urban highway. Travel times within the city hardly changed, which allows for a relatively clean identification of the other benefits via a hedonic pricing model. We find that the non-travel time benefits of such integrated infrastructure are substantial relative to the construction costs. A halving of distance to the tunneled segment is associated with a 3.4% appreciation in house prices since the start of the project. Taken together, the non-travel time effects add up to a quarter the construction costs.