This article argues that an effective way to analyse the macroeconomic effects of business-to-business electronic commerce is to regard it as a decline in the cost of information to producers. Calculations based on input-output tables and the IMF’s Multimod macroeconomic model show that...

The custom often acts as a powerful hindrance to equity-increasing changes. In this paper, we present a simple model of legal dualism in which a progressive legal reform can, under certain conditions, shift the conflicting custom in the direction intended by the legislator. Formal law then acts...

This article looks at the economic impact of electrification in the United States to gain insights about the possible consequences of today’s information technologies. A close study reveals that electrification significantly raised productivity growth by spurring a redesign of the optimal...

In this paper, we develop a theoretical model of household production, bargaining and credit to analyse how access to microcredit affects intra-household decision-making and welfare, and identify conditions under which female household members are most likely to benefit. We show that, consistent...

The question of the role of statutory law in social environments permeated by custom and traditional norms is particularly important when the statutory law aims to correct social inequalities embedded in the customs. The conventional view is that formal law often fails to take root in...

Group loans with joint liability have been a distinguishing feature of many microfinance programs. While such lending has benefitted millions of borrowers, major lending institutions have acknowledged their limited impact among the very poor and have recently favored individual contracts. This...

Abstract This paper develops a theory of informal insurance in the presence of an intertemporal technology. It is shown that when an insurance agreement suffers from enforcement problems, constraints on individual savings behaviour can enable the group to sustain greater cooperation. This result...

Empirical studies of intrahousehold allocation have revealed that, in many instances, gender is an important determinant in the allocation of resources within the household. Yet, within the theoretical literature, why gender matters within the household remains an open question. In this article,...