We study the impact of a large-scale economic crisis on gender equality, using historical data from Kazakhstan in the late 19th – early 20th century. We focus on sex ratios (number of women per man) in Kazakh nomadic population between 1898 and 1908, in the midst of large-scale Russian...

We analyze the individualization of farm units in Mali in the sense of a transformation of purely collective farms into mixed units in which private plots coexist with collective fields. While a moral-hazard-in-team problem plagues production on the latter, a dilemma arises insofar as the...

If we understand well the individualization of land tenure rules under conditions of growing land scarcity and increased market integration, much less is known about the mode of evolution of the farm-cum-family units possessing the land. Inspired by first-hand evidence from West Africa, this...

As in the case of agricultural cooperatives, collective fields in extended agricultural households act as an insurance device, by redistributing income between household members. At the same time they entail inefficiencies arising from the incentives to free ride on co-workers efforts....

Globalization has been accompanied by rising pressure from advocacy non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on multinational firms to act in socially-responsible manner. We analyze how NGO pressure interacts with industry structure, using a simple model of NGO-firm interaction embedded in an...

This paper systematizes the results of the empirical literature on development non-governmental organizations (NGOs), drawing both from quantitative and qualitative analyses, and constructs a set of basic facts about these organizations. These basic facts concern the size of the development NGO...

Mission-driven nonprofit organizations compete for donations through fundraising activities. Such competition can lead to inefficient outcomes, if nonprofits impose externalities on each others' output. This paper studies the sustainability of fundraising coordination agreements, using a...

We model the State as a self-enforcing agreement over the use of force. A principal contracts with an agent, and a powerful ruler enforces their contracts through a mix of monetary fines and coercion. If the ruler fails to enforce, or if he uses his power to expropriate, all parties revert to...

We study short-run and long-run effects of a government subsidy to private nonprofit ownership of public good projects. In a simple model, we show that the subsidy increases the prices of project assets in the short run; however, the effect does not persist and prices decline in the long run....

Across African countries, prevention policies are unrelated to the prevalence of HIV/AIDS and, even in countries in which they were successful, these policies are often unstable or reversed. To explain these two puzzles, we propose a simple political economy model that examines how prevention...