The practice of early marriage for women is prevalent in developing countries around the world today, and is believed to cause significant disruption in their accumulation of human capital. This paper develops an overlapping generations model of the marriage market to explain how the practice...

The use of social sanctions against behaviour which contradicts a set of informal rules is often an important element in the functioning of informal institutions in traditional societies. In the social sciences, sanctioning behaviour has often been explained in terms of the internalisation of...

In the past 30 years, microfinance has carried many promises of social and economic transformation, with the shift towards targeting women being seen as a major strategic move through which the promise of social development could be most effectively delivered. However, ethnographic studies have...

This paper looks at the determinants of secondary school attendance in Bangladesh with a focus on the interaction between community gender norms and relative supply of madrasas (i.e. Islamic schools). We present a theoretical framework where the probability of children's school participation...

Using data from the Indonesian Family Life Surveys, this paper studies the impact of fiscal decentralisation in Indonesia on local public spending across communities with different types of local institutions. Our results provide evidence of heterogeneity in access to public goods across...

We investigate donor-beneficiary relationships in participatory development programs, where (i) communities are heterogeneous and dominated by the local elite, (ii) the elite strategically propose a project to the donor, knowing that the latter has imperfect knowledge of the needs of the target...

Using data from the Indonesian Family Life Surveys, this paper studies the impact of fiscal decentralisation in Indonesia on local public spending across communities with different types of local institutions. Our results provide evidence of heterogeneity in access to public goods across...

The use of social sanctions against behaviour which contradicts a set of informal rules is often an important element in the functioning of informal institutions in traditional societies. In the social sciences, sanctioning behaviour has often been explained in terms of the internalisation of...

In developing countries, one in four girls is married before turning 18, with adverse consequences for themselves and their children. In this paper, we investigate whether laws can affect attitudes and behaviour towards child marriage –in a context in which the laws are not strictly enforced....

Despite significant improvement in female schooling over the last two decades, only a small proportion of women in South Asia are in wage employment. We revisit this puzzle using a nationally representative data set from Bangladesh. Probit regression results show that even after accounting for...