Governments provide public information about economic conditions to reduce information imperfections and facilitate efficient allocation of resources. Do households in developing countries rely on public signals to inform themselves about market conditions? To identify the importance of public...

Governments provide public information to reduce information imperfections. Do households rely on public signals to inform themselves about market conditions? To identify the importance of public information in households' price expectations, we take advantage of a unique natural experiment in...

Sunday birth rates in Ecuador have sharply declined, and the drop is larger among young cohorts in urban areas. These trends are attributed to an increase in cesarean births, which are generally scheduled during regular hospital hours. Multiple rounds of Health Surveys confirm that mothers with...

This paper takes advantage of a rich firm level data set from Ecuador to analyze the effects of a reform in 2007 that introduced imprisonment for tax evasion and made a firm’s CFO liable for tax-crimes. Our dataset contains actual tax-return and financial-statement information for the universe...

We use firm-level administrative data from Ecuador to study the implications of 'reverse withholding' for firms' tax behavior. Withholding does not affect tax liability of firms, but it may result in a discontinuity in the audit probability around the withholding threshold. Exploiting variation...

This paper presents evidence on the effects of economic liberalization of 1991 on the price responsiveness of aggregate private investment in India. The wide ranging reforms are expected to increase the price response of private investment due to (i) the Le Chatelier effect, (ii) a higher price...

This paper provides an analysis of potential unequal burden of bribery in schools on poor households in developing countries. The rich are more likely to pay bribes in the standard model where the probability of punishment for bribe taking by a teacher is the same irrespective of income of the...

This paper relaxes the single factor model of intergenerational educational mobility standard in the literature, and develops a research design to study the effects of parents' education and occupation on children's schooling. We use survey data from rural China that cover three generations and...

The existing studies report substantial improvements in educational mobility in post-reform India using intergenerational regression coefficient (IGRC) across age cohorts in a cross-section survey. In contrast, our estimates of sibling (SC) and intergenerational (IGC) correlations for the same...