We investigate the role of cosigners as collateral using data from a South Indian financial institution. Using an exogenous change in the cosigner requirement, we establish a negative causal effect of cosigners on defaults: an increase in the number of cosigners reduces defaults all these equal....

This article studies how altruism improves allocations in a private information environment where strategic behaviour reduces economic welfare. A theoretical analysis establishes that, in an environment characterised by uncertainty and private information, outcomes of auctions in Rotating...

This paper empirically analyzes sources of extreme economic distress in rural India. We use district-level data on farmers' suicides in two major states during the years 1998 to 2004 to estimate the effects of transitory economic shocks and structural change in agriculture on the incidence of...

This paper examines the effects of India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, currently the world's largest public employment program, on household consumption and poverty rates in rural India. Combining regionally coded data from consumption surveys with information on the...

Building on anthropological evidence, we develop a model of intra-household decision making on fertility and child survival within the framework of the collective household model. We carry out a test of the implications of this framework with data from Demographic and Health Surveys in rural...

We investigate how well social collateral does as an alternative to traditional physical collateral. We do so by studying cosigned loans - a borrower´s loan is backed by the personal guarantee of a cosigner. We use a regression discontinuity approach with data from South Indian bidding Roscas....

We study adoption of a costly new technology when the profitability of the new technique differs over individuals and there is uncertainty about these individual-specific differences. We establish that such individual-specific uncertainty results in a financing constraint when debt contracts are...

A bidding rotating savings and credit association (Rosca) is modeled as a sequence of symmetric-independent-private-value auctions with price-proportional benefits to bidders. We estimate a structural econometric model which, by introducing an altruistic component into each bidder's utility...

This article analyzes the relation among agricultural output, inflation, and the distribution of consumption in rural India, using both the Singh-Maddala and Dagum families to model the entire distribution parametrically. Employing a benchmark case in which growth is distributionally neutral and...

We model rotating savings and credit associations (Roscas) among risk-averse participants who experience privately observed income shocks. A random Rosca is not advantageous, whereas a bidding Rosca is if temporal risk aversion is less pronounced than static risk aversion. The payoff scheme of a...