Standard analysis of consumer behavior uses theory and evidence on quantities and prices to measure consumer welfare, particularly through the use of price indexes that capture the cost-of-living. In three essays I go beyond this standard analysis to analyze the impact of household variety, store variety, and energy requirements on food demand, consumption patterns and consumer welfare, with implications for several important topics in development and international economics.

In the first essay I develop theoretical and empirical tools for analyzing variety-seeking behavior by households in a non-homothetic setting, showing how changes in the slope and intercept of ``variety Engel curves'' map into the level and distribution of consumer welfare in a way that is not captured by standard analysis. The ``cost'' of variety is introduced as an important concept for analysis that is distinct from price, e.g. the ``cost'' of quantity. The application to Indian food consumption indicates that increases in food variety over time and greater urban food variety are not attributable solely to income growth, with significant implications for both the size and distribution of welfare gains from variety.

In the second essay, co-authored with Shari Eli, we continue to explore empirical patterns in Indian food consumption and draw attention to the decline in calorie intake at all expenditure levels. Once again the Engel curve is used as a guiding framework for the empirical analysis and once again there are changes in consumption patterns that are not explained by movements in prices and income alone. In this case the ``cost'' of calories is represented by the role of calories (as opposed to other food attributes) in satisfying household caloric requirements. Using data on time-use to impute caloric requirements and combining this with data on ownership of labor-saving durables, we find support for the hypothesis that a decline in energy requirements has had an important impact on variation in calorie intake over time and space, explaining most of the rural-urban discrepancy in calorie intake but only a modest share of the decline in calorie intake over time.

In the third essay I examine product variety from the point of view of retailers rather than consumers, showing that differences in variety across different stores of a North American grocery retailer have large impacts on consumer welfare. I argue that these differences in variety can be largely attributed to differences in store size and international borders, and provide a stylized partial equilibrium model to analyze what factors influence the retailer's choice of store size in different locations. I find empirical support for the predictions of the model, with larger markets (higher income per capita, higher population density) leading to larger store size and variety while greater competition reduces store size and variety, with significant impacts on consumer welfare across different geographic areas.

This dissertation applies tools developed in labor economics to empirically study questions in labor, development, and urban economics. Each chapter attempts to decompose a problem into competing explanations. The first decomposes racial segregation in US cities. The second decomposes differences in wages between agricultural workers and and non-agricultural workers. And finally, the last decomposes the heterogeneous responses of workers to a new monitoring technology.

In the first chapter, I revisit the question of whether residential segregationin US cities emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a consequence of decentralized location choices in combination with white antipathy toward black residents or whether it reflected institutionalized constraints on the availability of neighborhoods that black families could access. The chapter analyzes rich population data from the 1930 and 1940 censuses to disentangle these channels. I first lay out a simple discrete choice model of residential choices by white and black families that depends on the local price of housing and on the fraction of black residents in each neighborhood. I show how the preferences of both race groups can be identified using information on the impacts of exogenous inflows of white and black residents to different neighborhoods. White and black rural inflows constituted a major source of inmigration to major cities during this time period; I construct a pair of novel instrumental variables for these inflows by connecting the distributions of white and black surnames in rural areas to earlier migrants living in different census tracts in 1930. The resulting structural estimates confirm that white families had a relatively high willingness to pay to avoid black neighbors, consistent with an important role for preferences in the evolution of neighborhood segregation. Combining white and black preferences, however, I also find strong evidence that black residents faced supply side constraints on their neighborhood choices. I conclude that about one half of the overall degree of neighborhood segregation observed in 1940 was due to the different preferences of white and black families, while a comparable share was due to implicit or explicit constraints on which neighborhoods black families could move into.

While the first chapter interpreted incumbent residents' responses to migrants as reflective of their racial preferences, the second chapter, based on joint work with Marieke Kleemans, Joan Hamory Hicks, and Ted Miguel, directly studies the migrant experience itself. Recent research has pointed to large gaps in labor productivity between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors in low-income countries, as well as between workers in rural and urban areas. Most estimates are based on national accounts or repeated cross-sections of micro-survey data, and as a result typically struggle to account for individual selection between sectors. We use long-run individual-level panel data from two low-income countries (Indonesia and Kenya). Accounting for individual fixed effects leads to much smaller estimated productivity gains from moving into the non-agricultural sector (or urban areas), reducing estimated gaps by over 80%. Estimated productivity gaps do not emerge up to five years after a move between sectors. We evaluate whether these findings imply a re-assessment of the conventional wisdom regarding sectoral gaps, discuss how to reconcile them with existing cross-sectional estimates, and consider implications for the desirability of sectoral reallocation of labor.

Finally, the third chapter is based on joint work with Ernesto Dal Bó, Frederico Finan, and Laura Schechter and empirically studies models of task assignment within organizations in a developing country context. Standard models of hierarchy assume that agents and middle managers are better informed than principals about how to implement a particular task. We estimate the value of the informational advantage held by supervisors (middle managers) when ministerial leadership (the principal) introduced a new monitoring technology aimed at improving the performance of agricultural extension agents (AEAs) in rural Paraguay. Our approach employs a novel experimental design that, before randomization of treatment, elicited from supervisors which AEAs they believed should be prioritized for treatment. We find that supervisors did have valuable information---they prioritized AEAs who would be more responsive to the monitoring treatment. We develop a model of monitoring under different allocation rules and roll-out scales (i.e., the share of AEAs to receive treatment). We semi-parametrically estimate marginal treatment effects (MTEs) to demonstrate that the value of information and the benefits to decentralizing treatment decisions depend crucially on the sophistication of the principal and on the scale of roll-out.