This paper measures the economic impact of social pressure to share income with kin and neighbors in rural Kenyan villages. The authors conduct a lab experiment in which they randomly vary the observability of investment returns. The goal is to test whether subjects reduce their income in order...

This study estimates the impact of Kenya's post-election violence on individual risk preferences. Because the crisis interrupted a longitudinal survey of more than five thousand Kenyan youth, this timing creates plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to civil conflict by the time of the...

All OECD countries except the United States offer at least four months of paid maternity leave, and the average duration of mandated paid maternity leave has increased steadily from 1970 to the present. There is some evidence that paid leave policies above a certain duration negatively impact...

Many countries remain far from achieving gender equality in the classroom. Using data from 126 countries, we characterize the evolution of gender gaps in low- and middle-income countries between 1960 and 2010. We document five facts. First, women are more educated today than 50 years ago in...

Microfinance has been heralded as an effective way to address imperfections in credit markets. From a theoretical perspective, however, the success of microfinance contracts has puzzling elements. In particular, the group-based mechanisms often employed are vulnerable to free-riding and...

Empirically observed intertemporal choices about money have long been thought to exhibit present bias, i.e. higher short-term compared to long-term discount rates. Recently, this view has been called into question on both empirical and theoretical grounds, and a spate of recent findings suggest...

Languages use different systems for classifying nouns. Gender languages assign nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine. We construct a new data set, documenting the presence or absence of grammatical gender in more than 4,000 languages which together account for more than...