I exploit the abrupt closure of rural rail stations after Côte d’Ivoire’s 2011 post-presidentialelection crisis to study how losing access to outside labor markets affects rural living standards. Using nationally representative microdata, I find sizable declines in per-capita spending and consumption in rural areas exposed to rail closures relative to nearby controls. These declines coincide with a labor reallocation from higher-paying nonfarm employment into contributing-family work. I rationalize these patterns using a Roy model with heterogeneous nonfarm returns and sectoral mobility costs. The estimated nonfarm returns reveal strong heterogeneity, implying that similar transport investments can generate different welfare outcomes depending on which workers gain access to nonfarm jobs. Counterfactual simulations show that spatially targeted reopenings of a subset of rural rail stations are economically effective as they can achieve nearly the same welfare gains as full network restoration. These findings help inform infrastructure policy when budget constraints limit expansion.

We propose sharp testable implications and tests to jointly assess the random assignment, exclusion, and monotonicity assumptions in judge leniency designs. Our procedures accommodate various data scenarios in which the number of defendants handled by a judge may be either small or large, and allow for discrete or continuous instrumental variables. When the validity of the design is rejected, a variant of the marginal treatment effect can be identified under weaker assumptions. We apply our test to the Philadelphia court data studied by Stevenson (2018) and demonstrate that it outperforms non-sharp joint tests by significant margins in simulation studies.

Minimum wages are widely used to protect low-paid workers, yet compliance is uneven and enforcement is imperfect. We document global patterns of minimum wage non-compliance using harmonized microdata from 54 countries between 1995 and 2024. Non-compliance is pervasive and disproportionately affects disadvantaged workers, including women, rural, informal, and agricultural workers. Across countries and over time, larger compliance gaps coincide with wider wage gaps. A transparent accounting decomposition shows that unequal exposure to violations accounts for a non-trivial share of observed wage gaps, especially in low-wage occupations. To move beyond correlations, we study the creation of Peru’s national labor inspection authority (SUNAFIL) as a centralized enforcement shock that left the statutory minimum wage unchanged. Strengthened inspection reduced non-compliance primarily along the extensive margin. We develop a search model with imperfect enforcement and endogenous violation in which firms’ compliance decisions shape wage dispersion. The framework rationalizes the empirical patterns and quantifies how uneven enforcement amplifies wage gaps.