An economic experiment involving 24 small, tightly knit communities allows us to distinguish between trusting or trust-like behaviour based on expectational and non-expectational motivations. A model linking trusting behaviour to expectations of trustworthiness explains over half of the...

Financial sector development is a critical area of effective social protection policy. A well-regulated financial sector can complement government efforts to keep households from falling into poverty - by supplying the instruments needed to pool risks, or to self-insure against losses because of...

Data from three bargaining games-the Dictator Game, the Ultimatum Game, and the Third-Party Punishment Game-played in 15 societies are presented. The societies range from USundergraduates to Amazonian, Arctic, and African hunter-gatherers. Behaviour within the games varies markedly across...

Exploiting new data from a survey and behavioral experiment conducted in Peru we analyze individuals?preferences for securing income in old age. We identify a group that is unrationed by the mandate to save in Peruç—´ pension system, and draw insights from their affiliation and contribution...

This paper describes and analyzes the results of a unique field experiment especially designed to test the effects of the level of commitment and information available to individuals when sharing risk. We find that limiting exogenously provided commitment is associated with less risk sharing,...

There has been interest in the implications of learning by doing, and in particular in the possibility that learning by doing may be slower in less developed countries and in industries which use simpler technologies. This paper uses firm-level data from Ghana to estimate learning-by-doing...

Geographical imbalances in the health workforce have been a consistent feature of nearly all health systems, and especially in developing countries. In this paper we investigate the willingness to work in a rural area among final year nursing and medical students in Ethiopia. Analyzing data...

Experimental behavioral scientists have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in over a hundred experiments from around the world. Prior research cannot determine whether this uniformity results from universal patterns of behavior, or from the...