This paper studied whether the use of short message service (SMS) technology effectively informed Bogotas population of internally displaced persons (IDPs) about its eligibility to receive social benefits. Half of the sample population was randomly informed of their eligibility via SMS and their...

We investigate whether and how the type of unemployment benefit institution affects productivity. We designed a field experiment to compare workers' productivity under a welfare system, where the unemployed receive an unconditional monetary transfer, with their productivity under a workfare...

Intuitively, by increasing the opportunity cost of engaging in criminal activities, positive economic shocks should reduce crime. However, the empirical evidence on the relationship between economic shocks and criminal behavior is at best ambiguous. This may be because certain types of shocks...