In the rural areas of developing countries, teacher absence is a widespread problem. This paper tests whether a simple incentive programme based on teacher presence can reduce teacher absence, and whether it has the potential to lead to more teaching activities and better learning. In 60...

The construction of large dams is one of the most costly and controversial forms of public infrastructure investment in developing countries, but little is known about their impact. This paper studies the productivity and distributional effects of large dams in India. To account for endogenous...

The paper examines individuals’ abilities to identify the highly central people in their social networks, where centrality is defined by diffusion centrality (Banerjee, Chandrasekhar, Duflo, and Jackson, 2013), which characterizes a node’s influence in spreading information. It...

This paper discusses the two leading views of history and political institutions. For some scholars, institutions are mainly products of historical logic, while for others, accidents, leaders, and decisions have a significant impact. Given the possibility that policy decisions indeed make a...

This paper connects experience with emissions trading, from programs like the U.S. Rain program, to lessons for implementation of a Trading Pilot Scheme in India. This experience suggests that four areas are especially important for successful implementation of an emissions trading scheme.

This paper studies the role played by caste, education and other social and economic attributes in arranged marriages among middle-class Indians. A unique data set on individuals who placed matrimonial advertisements in a major newspaper, the responses they received, how they ranked them, and...

This paper studies the medium run consequences of an increase in the rate of accumulation of human capital in a developing country. From 1974 to 1978, the Indonesian government built over 61,000 primary schools. The school construction program led to an increase in education among individuals...

This paper uses political reservations for women in India to study the impact of women’s leadership on policy decisions. In 1998, one third of all leadership positions of Village Councils in West Bengal were randomly selected to be reserved for a woman: in these councils only women could...

Household surveys from 13 developing countries are used to describe consumption choices, health and education investments, employment patterns and other features of the of the economic lives of the “middle classes†defined as those whose daily consumption per capita is between $2 and...

This paper presents the results of two experiments conducted in Mumbai and Vadodara, India, designed to evaluate ways to improve the quality of education in urban slums. A remedial education programme hired young women from the community to teach basic literacy and numeracy skills to children...