We study the impacts of parental job loss and unemployment benefits on children's education in Brazil, using rich individual-level data on employment, school enrollment, and unemployment insurance for the entire population. Leveraging mass layoffs for identification, we find that parental job...

We study how distributional preferences are affected by a major property rights reform that transformed informal use-rights over land traditionally characterizing rural Beninese villages in a system akin to private ownership. The design combines the randomized control-trial implementation of the...

Recent theories of compliance predict that, apart from utilitarian considerations, individual decisions to respect or break the law account for virtuous motives and non-utilitarian willingness to promote the social good. We test whether empirical evidence resonates with these theories by...

We show that formalizing private property rights has a positive effect on the propensity to respect the property of others, a social preference with important implications for growth and economic development. Our identification strategy is based on a unique feature of a recent large-scale...

We study a large-scale land titling reform implemented as a randomized control-trial to isolate its causal effects on litigation. The reform consisted of demarcating land parcels, registering existing customary rights, and granting additional legal protection to rightholders. We find that, ten...

Governments both in developed and developing countries are facing the problem of value added tax (VAT) and sales tax evasion. This explains a growing interest in policies alternative to the traditional methods of deterrence. This paper describes the achievements resulting from a zero cost policy...

Humans display a puzzling cross-population variation in the ability to cooperate with out-group members. One hypothesis is that impartial institutions substituting kith and kin as risk-buffering providers would favor the expansion of cooperative networks. Here I propose a research design that...