When social benefits cannot be measured, a hybrid organization which selects managers based on motivation can be used to balance profi…ts with a social purpose. This paper develops a model of social enterprise based on selection of citizen-managers with this goal in mind. It develops the...

Institutions can limit governments' policy options. Such restrictions are usually commended as solutions to time inconsistency problems or coordination failures. However, policy constraints can have important drawbacks and these disadvantages have generally been overlooked to date. When...

CEOs affect the performance of the firms they manage, and family CEOs seem to weaken it. Yet little is known about what top executives actually do, and whether it differs by firm ownership. We study CEOs in the Indian manufacturing sector, where family ownership is widespread and the...

This paper contrasts individual liability lending with and without groups to joint liability lending. By doing so, we shed light on an apparent shift away from joint liability lending towards individual liability lending by some microfinance institutions First we show that individual lending...

Organizations often use awards to incentivize performance. We design a field experiment to unbundle the mechanisms through which awards may affect behavior: by facilitating social comparison and by conferring recognition and visibility. In a nationwide health worker training program in Zambia,...

This paper studies the interaction of incentive pay and social distance in the dissemination of information. We analyse theoretically as well as empirically the effect of incentive pay when agents have pro-social objectives, but also preferences over dealing with one social group relative to...

Ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development. This paper provides credible quantifi…cation of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in Kenyan districts across the 1963-2011 period. Guided by a model it then examines whether the transition in and out of...

The world's poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale and long-term randomized control trial in Bangladesh this paper demonstrates that sizable transfers of assets and skills enable the poorest women to shift out of...

People exaggerate the extent to which their private information is shared with others. This paper introduces this phenomenon portably into Bayesian games where people wrongly think that if they can condition their strategy on an event others can do as well. I apply the model to a variety of...