Does limited access to formal savings services impede business growth in poor countries? To shed light on this question, we randomized access to noninterest-bearing bank accounts among two types of self-employed individuals in rural Kenya: market vendors (who are mostly women) and men working as...

Regular use of effective health-products such as insecticide-treated mosquito nets (ITN) by a household benefits its neighbors by (a) reducing chances of infection and (b) raising awareness about product-effectiveness, thereby increasing product-use. Due to their potential social benefits and...

This paper concerns the problem of allocating a binary treatment among a target population based on observed covariates. The goal is to (i) maximize the mean social welfare arising from an eventual outcome distribution, when a budget constraint limits what fraction of the population can be...

Regular use of effective health-products such as insecticide-treated mosquito nets (ITN) by a household benefits its neighbors by (a) reducing chances of infection and (b) raising awareness about product-effectiveness, thereby increasing product-use.  Due to their potential social benefits and...

Short‐run subsidies for health products are common in poor countries. How do they affect long‐run adoption? A common fear among development practitioners is that one‐off subsidies may negatively affect long‐run adoption through reference‐dependence: People might anchor around the...

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) have been shown to increase human capital investments, but their standard features make them expensive. We use a large randomized experiment in Morocco to estimate an alternative government-run program, a "labeled cash transfer" (LCT): a small cash transfer made...

Many studies suggest that daily income earners behave as if they have daily income targets. Less work has examined the determinants of the targets themselves. Using data on labor supply, shocks, and self-reported cash needs from 257 bicycle taxi drivers in Western Kenya, we provide evidence that...

Regular use of effective health-products such as insecticide-treated mosquito nets (ITN) by a household benefits its neighbors by (a) reducing chances of infection and (b) raising awareness about product-effectiveness, thereby increasing product-use. Due to their potential social benefits and...

We report results from a randomized evaluation comparing three school-based HIV/AIDS interventions in Kenya: 1) training teachers in the Kenyan Government's HIV/AIDS-education curriculum; 2) encouraging students to debate the role of condoms and to write essays on how to protect themselves...

An information campaign that provided Kenyan teenagers in randomly selected schools with the information that HIV prevalence was much higher among adult men and their partners than among teenage boys led to a 65% decrease in the incidence of pregnancies by adult partners among teenage girls in...