Almost one-third of the population in developing countries is under age 15. Hence improving the effectiveness of policy interventions that target adolescents might be especially important. We analyze the intention to participate in training programs of adolescent girls in Uganda, a country with...

Industrial delicensing, which began in 1985 in India marked a discrete break from a past of centrally planned industrial development. Similar liberalization episodes are taking place across the globe. We develop a simple Schumpeterian growth model to understand how firms respond to the entry...

State-led credit and savings programs have been implemented in numerous low income countries, but their success in reaching the poor remains widely debated. We report on research that exploits the policy features of the Indian social banking program to provide evidence on this issue. State-led...

The question of who guards the guards is intimately connected with broader questions of state capacity and the establishment of a monopoly of violence in society, something which is often viewed as the defining feature of the modern state. But to establish such a monopoly, civilian rulers need...

This paper uses village and household survey data from South India to examine how political geography and politician identity impacts on public good provision. We provide evidence that the nature of this relationship varies by type of public good. For high spillover public goods residential...

This paper proposes a simple framework to study incentives and matching in the market for teachers. The framework is used to investigate the consequences of introducing incentive pay for teachers when contracts have both a matching and an incentive effect. Our analysis suggests that school...