What motivates individuals to become politicians? This is an important question in decentralized democracies, where local politicians play a key role in public goods provision. However, and in emerging economies, bureaucratic hurdles and administrative failures introduce uncertainty about the...

We examine how village level social group dominance affects the educational and occupational mobility of minority and other social groups in rural India across multiple generations. Theoretically, we distinguish between upper caste and own group dominance and examine the mechanisms underpinning...

We examine how village-level social group dominance affects the educational and occupational mobility of minority and other social groups in rural India across multiple generations. We distinguish between upper caste and own-group dominance and examine the mechanisms underpinning inequality in...

We model the interaction between the informal credit market and the act of tax collection by the government; in presence and functioning of the informal credit market, the agents (the tax paying firms) engage in false or sham litigation and deferred tax payments. During the litigation period...

We carry out a randomized controlled experiment in West Bengal, India to test three separate performance pay treatments in the public health sector. Performance is judged on improvements in child malnutrition. We exogenously change wages of government employed child care workers through either...

We study an important mechanism underlying employee referrals into informal low skilled jobs in developing countries. Employers can exploit social preferences between employee referees and potential workers to improve discipline. The profitability of using referrals increases with referee stakes...

We use the nation-wide policy of randomly allocating village council headships to women to identify the impact of female political leadership on the governance of projects implemented under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India. Using primary survey data, we find more program...

In spite of widespread acclaims of social audits as low-cost and powerful participatory tools that can bolster awareness and improve public service delivery, a key policy question is what such audits have achieved so far. Using a unique panel data set assembled from official social audit...

Despite the widespread occurrence of humanitarian emergencies such as epidemics, earthquakes, droughts, floods and violent conflict and despite the significant financial resources devoted to humanitarian assistance, systematic learning from such interventions using rigorous theory-based impact...

Many African countries are richly endowed with land, but the productive potential of the land base has been underutilised in farming systems with low intensity of external inputs and high intensity of labour. At the same time, mining and erosion of soils have been common features of rural Africa...