In this paper, I ask whether there is a relationship between land property rights and international migration. In order to identify the impact of property rights, I consider a country-wide land certification program that took place in Mexico in the 1990s. My identification strategy exploits the...

We analyze optimal contractual forms and equilibrium matching in a double-sided moral hazard model of sharecropping similar to Eswaran and Kotwal (1985). We show that, with endogenous matching, the presence of moral hazard can reverse the matching pattern relative to the first best, and that...

This paper addresses the question of how farmers displaced by acquisition of agricultural land for the purpose of industrialization ought to be compensated. Prior to acquisition, the farmers are leasing in land from a private owner or local government with a legally mandated sharecropping...

Consistent adoption of preventive health behaviors could save many lives, but we do not understand how to create consistent adoption. For example, low-cost point-of-use (POU) water treatment technologies such as chlorine and filters can substantially reduce diarrheal disease, a leading cause of...

This paper studies how land reform and population growth affect land inequality and landlessness, focusing particularly on indirect effects owing to their influence on household divisions and land market transactions. Theoretical predictions of a model of household division and land transactions...

Many important food quality and safety attributes are unobservable at the point of sale, particularly in informal markets with weak reputation effects. Through a framed field experiment conducted in western Kenya, we show that farmers place a large premium on maize they have grown themselves,...

We revisit the issue of fiscal procyclicality in commodity-rich nations–commodity republics in the nomenclature of this paper. Since commodity prices are plausibly a main driver of fiscal policy outcomes in these countries, we focus on the behavior of fiscal variables across the commodity...

We evaluate the impact of two school feeding schemes on health outcomes of pre-school age children in Burkina Faso: school meals which provide students with lunch each school day, and take home rations which provide girls with 10kg of cereal flour each month, conditional on 90% attendance rate....

This study examines doctors' prescribing decisions using controlled hospital visits with randomized patient insurance and doctor incentive status. The results suggest that, when they expect to obtain a proportion of patients' drug expenditures, doctors write 43% more expensive prescriptions to...

We propose a model where the size of the public sector and aggregate output are interrelated through the occupational choice of agents who differ in their skill level and degree of public-mindedness. When the public sector attracts bureaucrats with low degree of public service motivation, they...