First draft: December 1994 This draft: May 1996 <p> This paper investigates the extent to which poor households are discouraged from making a non-divisible but profitable investment. Using data on irrigation wells in India, we estimate the parameters of a structural model of irreversible...</p>

First draft: February 1996. This draft: November 1996. <p> Drawing insights from survey work on enterprise finance and from the literature on credit and labor markets, this paper investigates the spontaneous emergence of markets in the presence of heterogeneous agents and commitment failure. We...</p>

The lack of proper enforcement mechanism for sovereign debt generates a commitment failure. As a result, a sovereign may seek to improve its position in debt renegotiations and thus evade its debt obligations by reducing exports. Conditionality seeks to provide a solution to the incentive...

This paper investigates whether human capital raises the productivity and labor allocation of rural households in four districts of Pakistan. We find that households with better educated males earn higher off-farm income and divert labor resources away from farm activities toward non-farm work....

March 1997 <p> This paper tests the efficiency of insurance markets in the Pakistan Punjab by examining how crop choices are affected by the presence of price and yield risk. We estimate reduced-form and structural models of crop choices. Although we cannot reject the hypothesis that village...</p>

Using original data on gifts and loans, this paper investigates how rural Filipino households deal with income and expenditure shocks. Results indicate that gifts and informal loans are partly motivated by consumption smoothing motives but do not serve to efficiently share risk. Certain shocks...

Households in the west African semi-arid tropics face substantial risk -- an inevitable consequence of engaging in rainfed agriculture in a drought-prone environment. It has long been hypothesized that these households keep livestock as a buffer stock to insulate their consumption from income...

First draft: April 1996 This draft: October 1996 <p>This paper investigates the rationale for statistical discrimination and networks effects in the allocation of supplier credit. It examines the role they may play in favoring market participation and, hence, in the emergence and persistence of...</p>