A common premise in both the theoretical and policy literature on development is that people remain poor because they are too impatient to save and too risk averse to take the sort of chances needed to accumulate wealth. The empirical literature, however, suggests that this assumption is far...

This article contributes to the literature on the impact of transitional justice measures using microfoundational evidence from experiments. We argue that there is a distributional dilemma at the heart of transitional justice programs, given that the State must allocate goods and services both...

We use an experimental field approach to understand better the pro-social preferences andbehavior of both individuals involved in the provision of social services (public servants) and the behavior of those potential beneficiaries, the poor. We conducted field experiments using the Dictator,...

The afro-descendent people of the Sanquianga region in the Colombian Pacific Coast live under particularly extreme poverty conditions. Although highly integrated to markets through very frequent interactions, their access to basic social services and stable income generating activities are...

This paper reconsiders evidence from experimental common pool resource games from the perspective of a dynamic model of sampling. Despite being parameter-free, the model is able to replicate some striking features of the data: monotonic frequency distributions, the persistent use of strictly...

Any system of transfer payments must be administered by officials with some degree of discretionary power over the manner in which funds are allocated. Attitudes of such officials regarding the worthiness of various recipients therefore have implications for resource allocation. Using a sample...

We model the dynamic effects of external enforcement on the exploitation of a common pool resource. Fitting our model to the results of experimental data we find that institutions influence social preferences. We solve two puzzles in the data: the increase and later erosion of cooperation when...