Support for economic reforms has often shown puzzling dynamics: many reforms that began successfully lost public support. This paper shows that learning dynamics can rationalize this paradox because the process of revealing reform outcomes is an example of sampling without replacement. This...

Using a novel dataset with transactions level exports data from four African countries (Malawi, Mali, Senegal and Tanzania), this paper uncovers evidence of a high degree of experimentation at the extensive margin associated with low survival rates, consistent with high and middle income country...