We estimate the impact of international child sponsorship on adult income and wealth of formerly sponsored children using data on 10,144 individuals in six countries. To identify causal effects, we utilize an age-eligibility rule followed from 1980 to 1992 that limited sponsorship to children...

We carry out a cluster-randomized trial among 1,578 children from 979 households in rural El Salvador to test the impacts of TOMS shoe donations on children's time allocation, school attendance, health, self-esteem, and aid dependency. Results indicate high levels of usage and approval of the...

This article examines the impact of microenterprise credit programmes on class structure mobility in developing countries. It develops a model that endogenously generates an eight-fold class structure. Class membership is determined by optimal choice of labour activity, which is a function of...

An important question to microfinance is the relevance of existing social capital in target communities to the performance of group lending. This research presents evidence from field experiments in South Africa and Armenia, in which subjects participate in trust and microfinance games. We...

Race-based preferential policies have been employed in the United States and other countries such as Malaysia, South Africa, Brazil, and India to foster economic development among economically marginalized ethnic groups. This research applies a two-player signaling model to help understand...

What accounts for the discrepancy between microfinance impact claims of development practitioners and the far smaller impacts found in experimental studies? We demonstrate in a simple theoretical framework why “before-and-after” observations of practitioners overstate microfinance impacts...

Household investment in preventative health products is low in developing countries even though benefits from these products are very high. What interventions most effectively stimulate demand? In this paper, we experimentally estimate demand curves for health products in Kenya, Guatemala,...

This paper reports the results of an experiment testing a fundamental assumption in Stiglitz and Weiss' (1981) model of credit rationing: that defaulting borrowers are associated with investment in risky projects. Through an artefactual field experiment with 200 Bolivian microfinance borrowers,...

We define commercial public goods as goods that are broadcast via television, radio, newsprint, or websites for which consumption is non-rival and non-exclusive, and revenue is generated mainly through advertising alongside a product in a two-sided market. With new information technology the...