We introduce endogenous time preference via investment in patience (farsightedness) in an overlapping generations growth model to study development traps. There is no investment in patience, if the economy is very poor, while if it is wealthy enough there is always such investment. We explore...

We examine the choice of economic reforms when policymakers have present-biased preferences and can choose to discard information (maintain confidence) to mitigate distortions from excess discounting. The decisions of policymakers and firms are shown to be interdependent. Confident policymakers...

We document the level, type, and severity of crime in rural Bangladesh. Crime affected 36% of the households. The average cost of crime was worth two weeks' household consumption. We then study how microcredit affects crime. Our theoretical model shows how microcredit may increase cost of crime...

How does the public provision of education and the deployment of distortionary tax and subsidy instruments differ when the government's objective is conventional welfarist compared to when the objective is the non-welfarist one of equality of opportunity? This paper develops a framework in which...

Russian industrial enterprises inherited from the Soviet era a tradition of producing welfare and infrastructure services within the firm, also for outside users. Despite the massive restructuring of the economy that took place since, many firms are still active in service provision. At the same...

This paper reports first results from a survey of 404 middle-sized and large manufacturing firms from 40 Russian regions in April-June 2003. We examine the extent of social service and infrastructure provision by the firms and the firms' assessment of the quality of public infrastructure and the...

A common claim in the policy discourse is that a government wishing to achieve equality of opportunity should use public provision of education for equalisation of opportunities rather than income taxation, which only equalizes incomes. We develop a framework in which the tax and education...