In 1984, USAID launched the Demographic and Health Surveys program, an international effort to improve data on health and fertility in the developing world. I leverage the program's staggered introduction across countries, evaluating its effects on the geography of economic research. The DHS expanded the geographic coverage of economics, increasing the likelihood of a publication on a country each year by 7 percentage points, 26% of the control mean. However, it decreased the likelihood of a publication with a domestic coauthor. This suggests that access to data opens research opportunities in neglected regions, but reduces reliance on local collaboration.

Taller people earn more, especially in low- and middle-income countries. We present among the first evidence of this phenomenon in Africa, using longitudinal microdata on a cohort of middle-aged Kenyan adults. We document a substantial height/earnings premium: controlling for gender, age, and other socio-demographics, monthly earnings increase by 1.07% per centimeter (or 2.72% per inch). Nearly half this effect can be explained by differences in cognition, measured from an unusually rich battery containing 27 modules. Additional shares of the premium can be attributed to measures of physical strength and non-cognitive ability. In contrast to prior work, we find little role for occupational sorting: conditional on cognitive and non-cognitive ability, taller people do not appear more likely to work in higher paid sectors. Leveraging repeated measures of height and an instrumental variables specification, we find suggestive evidence that measurement error may be attenuating the estimated relationship.

I evaluate the growth of J-PAL and IPA regional offices on the spread of randomized controlled trials in economic research. The introduction of a J-PAL (IPA) office to a country raises the likelihood an RCT is published on it in a given year by 40 (25) percentage points. In levels, this effect corresponds to an increase of 3.27 (0.73) published RCTs. For J-PAL, nearly half this effect is driven by RCTs in health and education, while for IPA, agriculture, health, and education contribute approximately equally. Office openings do not crowd out experimental research in neighboring countries, and less than half of estimated effects is driven by researchers at “top 10” economics departments in the U.S. and Europe.