We study mechanism design in a setting where agents know their types but are uncertain about the utility from any alternative. The lnal realized utility of each agent is observed by the principal and can be contracted upon. In such environments, the principal is not restricted to using only...

We use the nation-wide policy of randomly allocating village council headships to women to identify the impact of female political leadership on the governance of projects implemented under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India. Using primary survey data, we find more program...

We construct a tractable endogenous growth model with production externalities in which the public capital stock augments investment speci?c technological change. We characterize the ?rst best ?scal policy and show that there exist several labor and capital tax-subsidy combinations that...

Much of the debate between the European and U.S. positions about labeling of genetically modified foods has been whether consumers perceive labels as a source of information or a signal to change behavior. In this paper, we provide an experimental framework for examining these roles of...

The existing literature on Indian growth finds no evidence of B convergence across states. This represents a puzzle given the relatively free flows of capital, labour and commodities across state borders. We use a new data set to estimate convergence rates across 575 Indian districts and find...

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) of India mandates 1/3rd of beneficiaries to be women and equal wages across gender. We study its impact on children's educational attainment via women's increased access to labor market opportunities. Using child level panel data, and taking...

We consider implementation of a deterministic allocation rule using transfers in quasi-linear private values environments. We show that if the type space is a multidimensional domain satisfying some ordinal restrictions, then an allocation rule is implementable in such a domain if and only if it...

We provide a complete characterization of intergenerational welfare state with education and pension under probabilistic voting where voters internalize the general equilibrium effects materializing in their life-span. We show that as public education is introduced in the economy through the...

In the presence of temptation and self-control preferences as in Gul and Pesendorfer, the optimal policy is to subsidize savings when consumers are tempted by "excessive" impatience (Krusell, Kuruscu and Smith, 2010). However, in the homogeneous agents model, taxation loses an important property...

We develop a tractable model of competition among motivated MFIs. We find that equilibria may or may not involve double-dipping (and consequently default), with there being double-dipping whenever the MFIs are very profit-oriented. Moreover, in an equilibrium with double-dipping, borrowers who...