Many social experiments are run in multiple waves, or are replications of earlier social experiments. In principle, the sampling design can be modified in later stages or replications to allow for more efficient estimation of causal effects. We consider the design of a two-stage experiment for...

Information asymmetries are important in theory but difficult to identify in practice. We estimate the empirical importance of adverse selection and moral hazard in a consumer credit market using a new field experiment methodology. We randomized 58,000 direct mail offers issued by a major South...

Questions remain as to whether results from experimental economics games are generalizable to real decisions in non-laboratory settings. Furthermore, important questions persist about whether social capital can help solve seemingly missing credit markets. I conduct two experiments, a Trust game...

Rural elderly have 40% of the income of those in urban areas, spend a larger share of their income on food, are in worse health, work later into their lives, and depend more on their children, lacking pensions and public services. The birth quota since 1980 has particularly restricted the...

We use a model of human capital investment and activity choice to explain facts describing gender differentials in the levels and returns to human capital investments. These include the higher return to and level of schooling, the small effect of healthiness on wages, and the large effect of...

Using Current Population Survey (CPS) data from 1989 to 1999, we examine the impact of family cap policies, which deny incremental welfare benefits, on out-of-wedlock birth rates. We use the first five states that were granted waivers from the Department of Health and Human Services to implement...

Ireland's relatively late and feeble fertility transition remains poorly-understood. The leading explanations stress the role of Catholicism and a conservative social ethos. This paper reports the first results from a project that uses new samples from the 1911 census of Ireland to study...

The decline of human fertility that occurred in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, and elsewhere in the twentieth century, remains a topic of debate largely because there is no accepted explanation for the event. Disagreement persists in part because researchers have rarely used...

Using micro-data from 1984 and 1993 in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, this paper estimates a dynamic stock adjustment model, relating observed drops in fertility post-Communism to new wages, prices, and risks. Earnings influence total demand for children during Communism through substitution...

We examine a randomized trial that allows separate identification of peer screening and enforcement of credit contracts. A South African microlender offered half its clients a bonus for referring a friend who repaid a loan. For the remaining clients, the bonus was conditional on loan approval....