This paper studies whether a particular socio-emotional skill -grit (the ability to sustain effort and interest toward long-term goals)-can be cultivated and how this affects student learning. The paper implements, as a randomized controlled trial, a nationwide low-cost intervention designed to...

This paper models an entrepreneur's choice between investing in a safe activity or experimenting with a new risky one, and how much to invest in the "entrepreneurial capital" that would permit more effective use of the arriving information on the latter- how much to learn how to learn. Optimal...

This paper examines the effects of a negative macroeconomic shock on the financial performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in infrastructure. It exploits the differential effects of a drastic fall in oil prices (in 2014-15) on SOEs in energy-rich countries relative to SOEs in...

This paper examines the impact of return migration from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf on the transfer of gender norms to the Indian state of Kerala. Migration to countries in the Middle East has led to significant remittance flows and economic prosperity, although the effects on social norms and...

This paper presents the results of a randomized controlled trial testing the effectiveness of taxpayer communications informed by behavioral science in inducing business payroll tax compliance at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, an experimental tax trial targeting 5,423 firms...

Adaptive sampling in experiments with multiple waves can improve learning for "policy choice problems" where the goal is to select the optimal intervention or treatment among several options. This paper uses a real-world policy choice problem to demonstrate the advantages of adaptive sampling...