"An AIDS epidemic threatens Ethiopia with a long wave of premature adult mortality, and thus with an enduring setback to capital formation and economic growth. The authors develop a two-sector model with three overlapping generations and intersectorally mobile labor, in which young adults...

India's rural roads program, Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, aims to draw villagers into the mainstream by improving not only their terms of trade, but also their educational attainments and health. Treating each all-weather feeder road as an isolated element within the larger network, and...

All-weather rural roads usually improve not only villagers' terms of trade, but also their educational attainments and health. Obtaining empirical estimates of the benefits generated by the first is straightforward, not so those generated by the others. The object of this paper is to estimate...

This paper considers a procedurally fair provision mechanism that allows members of a small group to determine, through their bids, which project to implement. Previous experiments with (only) costly projects have demonstrated that the mechanism is efficiency enhancing. Our experiment tests...

We use experimental methods to study the power of leading by words. The context is a voluntary contribution mechanism with one-way communication. One group member can send a free-form text message to his fellow players. Contrary to the commonly accepted wisdom that the cooperation-enhancing...

This paper analyzes the effects of all-weather rural roads on households' net output prices, education and health in a poor, drought-prone region of India. Of 30 villages originally surveyed in 2001-02, when two had such roads, a further nine received them between January 2007 and December 2009...

Tales of Peasants, Traders, and Officials: Contracting in Rural Andhra Pradesh, 1980-82 stems from a research project in the subfield of rural economic organization, with a focus on credit and irrigation, and on how public policy in these domains influenced agricultural development. The...

Policy makers bemoan the lack of research findings to guide urgent decisions, whereas researchers' professional code puts rigor first. This article argues that provisional assessments, produced early in the research cycle, can bridge the gap. Numerous case studies point to the importance of...