We analyze the demand and supply characteristics of the Indian telecommunications market, in order to assess the potential effectiveness of universal access policies in developing countries. We provide some empirical evidence on the supply and demand characteristics, using a small...

Tariff reductions have gender-specific effects on the labor market that change the relative bargaining power within households, which in turn affects child outcomes. We estimate how changes in parental labor supply due to these tariff reductions affect child schooling by focusing on young...

This paper estimates the returns to household income due to improved access to electricity in rural India. We examine the effect of connecting a household to the grid and of the quality of electricity, defined as hours of daily supply. The analysis is based on two rounds of a representative...

We test the predictions of a behavioral model of transactional electoral politics in the context of a randomized anti-vote-selling intervention in the Philippines. We model selling one’s vote as a temptation good: it creates positive utility for the future self at the moment of voting, but not...

We study an important mechanism underlying employee referrals into informal low skilled jobs in developing countries. Employers can exploit social preferences between employee referees and potential workers to improve discipline. The profitability of using referrals increases with referee stakes...

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are important for employment and economic activity; however, they are perceived to lack adequate financing, which hampers their growth. As a consequence, governments have implemented a number of programs to foster SME lending and attention has focused on...

We develop and estimate a model of dynamic interactions in which commitment is limited and contracts are incomplete to explain the patterns of income and consumption growth in village economies of less developed countries. Households can insure each other through both formal contracts and...

In a careful and thorough empirical study, Christopher Udry (1996) shows convincingly that, in a large sample of West African households, household resource allocations were not Pareto efficient. This paper argues that observation of the Pareto inefficiency of a household resource allocation...

The industrialization process of a country is often plagued by a failure to coordinate investment decisions. Using the Global Games approach we can solve this coordination problem and eliminate the problem of multiple equilibria. We show how appropriate information provision enhances efficiency....

There is a well-known debate about the roles of geography versus institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross-country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity cannot...