In the light of first-hand data from a Beninese urban household survey in Cotonou, we investigate several motives aiming to explain participation in Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs). We provide empirical findings which lead us to think that the main reason why individuals join a...

In the light of first-hand data from a Beninese urban household survey in Cotonou, we investigate several motives aiming to explain participation in Rotating Savings and Credit Associations. We provide anecdotal pieces of evidence, descriptive statistics, FIML regressions and matching estimates...

This paper documents the impact of the violent civil war affecting the Democratic Republic of Congo in the period 1997–2004 on infant mortality. It adopts an instrumental variable approach to correct for the nonrandom timing and location of conflict events using mineral price index...

This paper documents the impact of civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo on infant mortality between 1997 and 2004. It adopts an instrumental variable approach to correct for the non-random timing and location of conflict. Strong and robust evidence, including mother fixed effects...

This paper exploits original data collected in Benin, using both income and expenditure at the individual level. We provide evidence suggesting that husbands and wives do not pool their respective incomes and thus do not make expenditure decisions on the basis of a common budget. As corroborated...

In the light of first-hand data from a Beninese urban household survey in Cotonou, we investigate several motives aiming to explain participation in Rotating Savings and Credit ASsociations. We provide empirical findings which indicate that individuals use their participation in a rosca as a...

A group of agents voluntarily participates in a joint project, in which efforts are not perfectly substitutable. The output is divided according to some given vector of shares. A share vector is "unimprovable" if no other share vector yields a higher sum of payoffs. When the elasticity of...

Agents voluntarily contribute to an infinitely repeated joint project. We investigate the conditions for cooperation to be a renegotiation-proof and coalition-proof equilibrium before examining the influence of output share inequality on the sustainability of cooperation. When shares are not...