Do transitory economic shocks affect neonatal outcomes? I show that an unexpected, month-long blackout in Tanzania caused a sharp but temporary drop in work hours and earnings for workers in electricity-dependent jobs. Using records from a maternity ward, I document a reduction in birth weights...

Intermediaries that assist individuals and firms with the government bureaucracy are common in developing countries. Although such bureaucracy intermediaries are, anecdotally, linked with corruption and welfare losses, few formal analyses exist.

We use a principal–agent framework and data from the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey between 1994 and 2004 to understand biases in the distribution of food aid in Ethiopia. We show that even when aid is systematically misallocated, aid recipients may match official classifications of needy...

This paper studies how environmental regulation shapes the pattern of foreign direct investment (FDI), and thereby assesses the pollution haven hypothesis. Conflicting results exist in the case studies examining the most advanced countries, partly due to the deterrent effect of clean technology...

Schools in developing countries frequently offer for-profit tutoring to their own students. This potentially gives teachers a perverse incentive to teach less during school to increase demand for their tutoring. Through this mechanism, the market for tutoring can adversely affect student...

We randomly assigned male migrant workers in Qatar invitations to a motivational workshop aimed at improving financial habits and encouraging joint decision-making with spouses back home in India. 13–17months later, we surveyed migrants and wives to estimate intent-to-treat impacts in their...

We conduct randomized experiments around a large-scale financial literacy course in Mexico City to understand the reasons for low take-up among a general population, and to measure the impact of this financial education course. Our results suggest that reputational, logistical, and specific...

We investigate whether living arrangements respond to an arguably exogenous shift in the distribution of power in family economic decision-making. In the early 1990s, the South African Old Age Pension was expanded to cover most black South Africans above a sex-specific age cut-off resulting in a...

This paper explores the impact of trade on the relative returns to skill in the presence of non-homothetic preferences. In a general equilibrium model of trade in differentiated products, it is shown that, if consumers react to a rise in real income by increasing their demands of the relatively...

In this paper we investigate the role of expected returns to schooling and of perceived risks (of unemployment and earnings) as determinants of schooling decisions. Moreover, our data also allow us to analyze whether youths' and/or mothers' expectations predict schooling decisions, and whether...