Standard models often predict that people should either demand to save or demand to borrow, but not both. We hypothesise instead that saving and borrowing among microfinance clients are substitutes, satisfying the same underlying demand: for a regular schedule of deposits and a lump-sum...

We gave US$1,000 cash prizes to winners of a business ideas competition in Africa. The competition, entitled ‘Aspire’, is intended to attract young individuals aspiring to become entrepreneurs. Participants were ranked by panels of judges composed of established entrepreneurs. Each panel...

We run a novel field experiment to link managers of African manufacturing firms. The experiment features exogenous link formation, exogenous seeding of information and exogenous assignment to treatment and placebo. We study the impact of the experiment on firm business practices outside of the...

Personalized Digital Assistants (PDAs) and other forms of hardware needed to collect survey data electronically have become more affordable and powerful in recent years, leading to their use in a number of surveys in developing countries. Simple use of these devices can offer the prospect of...

Standard models of investment predict that credit-constrained firmd should grow rapidly when given additional capital, and that how this capital is provided should not affect decisions to invest in the business or consume the capital. We randomly gave cash and in-kind grants to male- and female-...

In this paper, we use a three-period panel of Tanzanian households to explore the determinants of earnings and earnings growth from 2004 to 2006. In doing so, we draw particular attention to the role of education and to the importance of heterogeneity between more and less formal occupations....

We play a one-shot public good game in rural India between farmers connected by an exogenous star network. Contributions by the centre of the star reach more players and have a larger impact on aggregate payoffs than contributions by the spoke players. Yet, we find that the centre player...

We estimate the impacts of being connected to politicians on occupational choice. We use an administrative dataset collected in 2008-2010 on 20 million individuals and rely on naming conventions to assess family links to candidates in elections held in 2007 and 2010. We first estimate the value...

The literature has shown that network architecture depends crucially on whether links are formed unilaterally or bilaterally, that is, on whether the consent of both nodes is required for a link to be formed. We propose a text whether network data is best seen as an actual link or willingness to...

We investigate whether the set of available enforcement mechanisms affects the formation of risk sharing relations by applying dyadic regression analysis to data from a specifically designed behavioural experiment, two surveys and a genealogical mapping exercise. During the experiment...