This paper exploits unexpected delays in the implementation of a home upgrading government program for low-income households in the Dominican Republic to quantify the adverse impact of delays on subjective measures of well-being. The findings show that failure to account for delays in program...

The aim of this paper is to understand the mechanism underlying access to credit. The author focuses on two important aspects of rural credit markets in Thailand. First, moneylenders and other informal lenders coexist with formal lending institutions such as government or commercial banks, and...

In order to understand the impact of facilitating access to savings accounts and to examine the importance of these barriers for formal savings, author designed a field experiment among smallholder cash crop farmers in Malawi. In partnership with a local microfinance institution, author...

The current financial crisis has pushed many firms to the brink of bankruptcy. A key policy question is thus whether bankruptcy laws are efficient, in the sense of allowing better firms to reorganize while liquidating unviable firms. The sixth in impact series presents lessons from a reform in...

The third in new series of impact notes highlights an example of where randomized experiments have been used to help understand the impact of a new insurance product first developed by Commodity Risk Management Group (CRMG) at the World Bank and various public and private partners in several...

The authors present a randomized field experiment measuring the direct impact and social network spillovers of providing financial literacy and discount vouchers on farmers decision to purchase index-based drought insurance. To examine this, the authors form clusters by grouping together...

Borewells for groundwater extraction have proliferated across India, encouraged by massive electricity subsidies. Because the discharges from borewells operating near one another are mutually attenuated, farmers interact strategically with potentially many neighbors in deciding whether and when...

This paper reviews evidence on agent networks of microfinance institutions and other financial services providers, which have expanded rapidly in recent years in some low- and middle-income contexts. There is emerging evidence that clients become more financially active as a result of the...

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of nonsystematic income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and nonprice factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product. Demand is significantly...

In village economies, insurance networks are key to smoothing shocks, while production networks can propagate them. The interplay of these networks is crucial. We show that a significant health expenditure shock to one household propagates to other linked households via supply-chain and labor...