For the chronically poor, the various livelihood constraints are structured and interlocked in complex knots that fail to carry forward automatic induced impacts through interventions, such as microfinance, that work on untying important strategic knots. BRAC, a poverty-focussed NGO in...

We present evidence from a six-year field experiment with young job seekers in urban labor markets in Uganda. We study how standard labor market interventions impact their search behavior, long run labor market outcomes, and how these long run outcomes are mediated through search behavior. The...

There are 420 million young people in Africa today. Understanding how youth search for jobs and what affects their ability to find good jobs is of paramount importance. We do so using a field experiment tracking young job seekers for six years in Uganda's main cities. We examine how two standard...

Many development programs are short-term interventions, either because of external funding constraints or an assumption of impact sustainability. Using a novel randomized phaseout research method, we provide experimental tests of phaseout effects of an extension program designed for women...

A society that believes wealth to be determined by random "luck", rather than by merit, demands more redistribution. We present evidence of this behavior by exploiting a natural experiment provided by the L'Aquila earthquake in 2009, which hit a large area of Central Italy through a series of...