Targeted transfer programs for poor citizens have become increasingly common in the developing world. Yet, a common concern among policy-makers and citizens is that such programs tend to discourage work. We re-analyze the data from seven randomized controlled trials of government-run cash...

The point of departure of this paper is that in the absence of effectively functioning asset markets the distribution of wealth matters for efficiency. Inefficient asset markets depress total factor productivity (TFP) in two ways: first, by not allowing efficient firms to grow to the size that...

This paper uses variation in access to a targeted lending program to estimate whether firms are credit constrained. The basic idea is that while both constrained and unconstrained firms may be willing to absorb all the directed credit that they can get (because it may be cheaper than other...

We study attitudes towards domestic violence in a sample of young women and men exposed to the edutainment TV series MTV Shuga 3, which features a sub-plot on this theme, and in a sample that was not. We measure viewers' memory of the characters and identification with them. Eight months after...

We use unique data from 600 Indonesian communities on what individuals know about the poverty status of others to study how network structure influences information aggregation. We develop a model of semi-Bayesian learning on networks, which we structurally estimate using within-village data....

We use a unique data-set from Indonesia on what individuals know about the income distribution in their village to test theories such as Jackson and Rogers (2007) that link information aggregation in networks to the structure of the network. The observed patterns are consistent with a basic...

We use a unique data-set from Indonesia on what individuals know about the income distribution in their village to test theories such as Jackson and Rogers (2007) that link information aggregation in networks to the structure of the network. The observed patterns are consistent with a basic...

In developing countries, identifying the poor for redistribution or social insurance is challenging because the government lacks information about people's incomes. This paper reports the results of a field experiment conducted in 640 Indonesian villages that investigated two main approaches to...

Economic theory suggests that, when designing aid programs, ordeal mechanisms that impose differential costs for rich and poor can induce self-selection and hence improve targeting ("self-targeting"). We first re-examine this theory and show that ordeal mechanisms may actually have theoretically...

This paper investigates the impact of elite capture on the allocation of targeted government welfare programs in Indonesia, using both a high-stakes field experiment that varied the extent of elite influence and non-experimental data on a variety of existing government transfer programs....