Small-scale cross-border trade provides opportunities for economic gains in many developing countries. Yet cross-border traders - many of whom are women - face harassment and corruption, which can undermine these potential gains. This paper presents evidence from a randomized controlled trial of...

A vast literature shows the importance of socioemotional skills in earnings and employment, but whether they matter in getting hired remains unanswered. This study seeks to address this question and further investigates whether socioemotional skill signals in job applicants' resumes have the...

This paper experimentally examines efforts aimed at improving health worker performance in the context of the 2014-15 West African Ebola crisis. Roughly two years before the outbreak in Sierra Leone, the study randomly assigned two accountability interventions to government-run health...

Countries design programs for supporting firms, with varying levels of success. Firm growth is constrained by several factors, such as low firm capabilities (e.g. management), availability of finance, and access to markets. Based on the available experimental evidence on firm support programs in...

Can communication designed to increase support for government policy and shift perceptions of state capacity redress deep-rooted mistrust in state institutions? This paper finds providing information on past state effectiveness, highlighting citizens' cooperation in enabling past effectiveness...

This paper studies the impact of "nudges" on taxpayers with varying tax compliance histories in Papua New Guinea. It presents the results from two population-wide randomized controlled trials in a setting that is characterized by low compliance rates and a lack of effective enforcement. The...