Sex workers receive a price premium for unprotected sex. Research has inferred that the source of this premium is a compensating differential for STI risk. I introduce a compensating differential for pregnancy risk as a novel source through a simple model that incorporates both STI risk and...

Staff from the Twaweza initiative and SNV travelled to rural communities in northern Tanzania in order to understand what development means on the ground and how people make change happen. Rakesh Rajani describes their experience and how it challenges normative conceptions about development and...

We are grateful to Taryn Dinkelman, John Driscoll, Frederik Eijkman, James Habyarimana, Stephen Mwaura, Benno Ndulu, Pauline Vaughn, Dean Yang and seminar participants at Tulane University and the NBER Africa Success Conference for helpful comments and suggestions. Emilio Depetris Chauvin,...

M-Pesa is a mobile phone based money transfer system in Kenya which grew at a blistering pace following its inception in 2007. We examine how M-Pesa is used as well as its economic impacts. Analyzing data from two waves of individual data on financial access in Kenya, we find that increased use...

We study the mobile phone-based money transfer system in Kenya. Based on aggregate data, we estimate that the velocity with which units of e-money are transferred among users is approximately four times per month, and that the average number of transfers undergone by a unit of e-money between...

School choice systems designed to help disadvantaged groups might be hindered by information asymmetries. Kenyan elite secondary schools admit students from the entire country based on a national test score, district quotas, and stated school choices. We find even the highest ability students...

The most desirable Kenyan secondary schools are elite government schools that admit the best students from across the country. We exploit the random variation generated by the centralized school admissions process in a regression discontinuity design to obtain causal estimates of the effects of...

The most desirable Kenyan secondary schools are elite government schools that admit the best students from across the country. We exploit the random variation generated by the centralized school admissions process in a regression discontinuity design to obtain causal estimates of the effects of...

We identify the impact of the 2003 Kenyan Free Primary Education (FPE) programme on gender imbalances in the number of students graduating from primary school and achievement on the primary school exit examination. Our identification strategy exploits temporal and spatial variations in the...