We conduct a field experiment to investigate employers’ trust in workers. A sample of real entrepreneurs and workers from urban Ghana are respectively assigned to the roles of employers and employees. Employers have the option to hire (trust) an employee, who can in turn choose whether to...

We play a one-shot public good game in rural India between farmers connected by an exogenous star network. Contributions by the centre of the star reach more players and have a larger impact on aggregate payoffs than contributions by the spoke players. Yet, we find that the centre player...

We run a novel field experiment to link managers of African manufacturing firms. The experiment features exogenous link formation, exogenous seeding of information and exogenous assignment to treatment and placebo. We study the impact of the experiment on firm business practices outside of the...

Standard models often predict that people should either demand to save or demand to borrow, but not both. We hypothesise instead that saving and borrowing among microfinance clients are substitutes, satisfying the same underlying demand: for a regular schedule of deposits and a lump-sum...

We gave US$1,000 cash prizes to winners of a business ideas competition in Africa. The competition, entitled ‘Aspire’, is intended to attract young individuals aspiring to become entrepreneurs. Participants were ranked by panels of judges composed of established entrepreneurs. Each panel...

Personalized Digital Assistants (PDAs) and other forms of hardware needed to collect survey data electronically have become more affordable and powerful in recent years, leading to their use in a number of surveys in developing countries. Simple use of these devices can offer the prospect of...

Standard models of investment predict that credit-constrained firmd should grow rapidly when given additional capital, and that how this capital is provided should not affect decisions to invest in the business or consume the capital. We randomly gave cash and in-kind grants to male- and female-...

This paper looks at the link between housing conditions and household income and labour market participation in South Africa. I use four waves of panel data from 2002-2009 on households that were originally living in informal dwellings. I find that those households that received free government...

Do high costs of search affect the labour market outcomes of young job seekers living far away from the centre of cities? I randomly assign temporary and non-fungible transport subsidies to unemployed youth living in spatially dislocated areas of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Lowering transport costs...

In this paper we explore whether low rates of sustained technology use can be explained by heterogeneity in returns to adoption. To do so we evaluate impacts of the Cocoa Abrabopa Association, which provided a package of fertilizer and other inputs on credit to cocoa farmers in Ghana. High...