These essays are, ultimately, about policy challenges. In Chapter 1, I explore one way in which the hostile, divisive political environment undermines one fundamental function of government performance: the enforcement of basic transparency laws over politically charged entities. In Chapter 2, I show that common labor market policies affect the pace of technological change, a key driver of wage inequality to which the literature has struggled to find responses. In Chapter 3, my coauthors and I evaluate one program that was effective in improving health for poor populations in the minimally governed peripheries of there country, where much of the world's most extreme poverty is concentrated and where traditional development policy is nearly impossible to implement.