Inspired by the Chinese experience, we develop a Schumpeterian growth model of distance to frontier in which economic growth in the developing country is driven by domestic innovation as well as imitation and transfer of foreign technologies through foreign direct investment. We show that...

One of the main elements separating different models of intrahousehold allocations is the household information set. This paper tests for the endogeneity of the household information set in a context where household members cannot observe each other easily: spousal information in the context of...

Standard models of investment predict that credit-constrained firms should grow rapidly when given additional capital, and that how this capital is provided should not affect decisions to invest in the business or consume the capital. We randomly gave cash and in-kind grants to male- and...

In recent years, index-based insurance has been offered to smallholder farmers in the developing world to protect against common shocks such as weather shocks. Despite their attractive properties, these products have met with low demand. We consider the frequent situation where farmers are...

We show theoretically that the presence of basis risk in index insurance makes it a complement to informal risk sharing, implying that index insurance crowds-in risk sharing and leading to a prediction that demand will be higher among groups of individuals that can share risk. We report results...

We propose an integrated method based on a two-sector small open economy dynamic and stochastic general equilibrium model to estimate non-tariff barriers and quantify the impact of services liberalization. The major component of trade barriers is explicitly modeled through the introduction of...

This paper investigates the accuracy of recall data by comparing administrative records with retrospective, self-reported survey responses to income and asset questions for a sample of self-employed households from coastal India. It finds that the magnitude of the recall error increases over...

We investigate donor–beneficiary relationships in participatory development programmes, where (i) communities are heterogeneous and dominated by the local elite, (ii) the elite strategically proposes a project to the donor, knowing that the latter has imperfect knowledge of the needs of the...

In this note we show how a considerably simpler model than the one in our original JDE 2006 paper generates all the same results. We also acknowledge an error in the specification of a utility function in our previous paper.

We conduct a randomized experiment among women in urban Sri Lanka to measure the impact of the most commonly used business training course in developing countries, the Start-and-Improve Your Business (SIYB) program. We study two groups of women: a random sample operating subsistence enterprises...