Watersheds and irrigation systems have the characteristic of connecting people vertically by water flows. The location of users along these systems defines their role in the provision and appropriation of water which adds complexity to the potential for cooperation. Verticality thus imposes a...

The dilemma of collective action around water use and management involves solving both the problems of provision and appropriation. Cooperation in the provision can be affected by the rival nature of the appropriation and the asymmetries in the access. We report two field experiments conducted...

"In particular, the academic debate over the best prediction about the behavior of people that use a common-pool resource (CPR), and the recommended policy approaches to the CPR dilemma have undergone a very interesting evolution throughout the last 3 decades of the pastcentury, since the...

A common premise in both the theoretical and policy literatures on development is that people remain poor because they are too impatient to save and too risk averse to take the sort of chances needed to accumulate wealth. The empirical literature, however, suggests that this assumption is far...

Economic loss to society due to dishonesty can be quite large. Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across sixteen countries. This...

Community mobilization is a key feature of community-based development projects. Community mobilization requires facilitating communication between village members and between leaders and the rest of the community. Is communication an effective device through which mobilization may foster...

This paper explores the extent to which individuals trust, reciprocate, cooperate and pool risk by using a battery of field experiments containing the trust game, the voluntary contributions mechanism and the risk pooling game; applied in six capital cities in Latin America. The results suggest...

This paper explores the link between what people say they prefer to do and what they actually do. Using data from an experimental project exploring trust and pro-sociality for representative samples of individuals in six Latin American capital cities, the paper links the results of these...