We apply the set up of limited commitment model to empirically test the role of informal risk-sharing networks using panel data on informal credit transactions from rural Ethiopia. The empirical estimates provide convincing evidence for the belief that enforcement problem limits the direct role...

If entrepreneurs have private information about factors influencing the outcome of an investment, individual lending is inefficient. The literature emphasizes improvements through non-market organizations that harness local information through peer monitoring. I investigate the complementary...

We analyze how the financial crisis affected a wide range of investments in Indonesian children and children's outcomes including school enrollment, immunizations, and mortality. Our dataset is the National Socio-Economic Survey (Susenas), a large nationally representative sample. We build on...

In much of the developing world daughters receive lower education and other investments than do their brothers, and may even be so devalued as to suffer differential mortality. Daughter disadvantage may be due in part to social norms that prescribe that daughters move away from their natal...

We analyze how the financial crisis affected a wide range of investments in Indonesian children and children's outcomes including school enrollment, immunizations, and mortality. Our dataset is the National Socio-Economic Survey (Susenas), a large nationally representative sample. We build on...

In this paper, we survey some of the developments in India’s IT sector, and prospects for broad-based growth led by this sector. We examine the IT sector, discussing the role of software versus hardware, the growth pattern of the software industry and software exports, and the potential...

In many nations, parents exhibit a variety of behaviors that favor sons over daughters. In this paper we provide evidence suggesting that in Indonesia there is no problem of "missing daughters" and that patterns of births, birth spacing and nutrition allocations do not suggest son preference...

The paper uses micro-level data obtained from surveying informal and formal small textile producers in Bolivia to estimate the economic returns to social capital. Social capital is defined as being linked to other individuals. The paper studies forms of social links that vary with respect to...

This paper develops a simple and practical framework for characterizing (long-run) economic growth and fluid capital accumulation under shifting technological change. The framework specifies a technological change that depends on exogenous and endogenous factors as well as the interaction...

In this paper, we study the return to human capital variables for wages of workers observed in Tunisian matched worker-firm data in 1999. This tells us how returns to human capital in a Less Developed Country like Tunisia differ from the industrial countries usually studied with matched data. We...