Group lending has been widely adopted in the past thirty years by many microfinance institutions as a means to mitigate information asymmetries when delivering credit to the poor. This paper proposes an empirical method to address the potential omitted-variable problem resulting from unobserved...

International agricultural research is expanding beyond the development of annual crop technologies for individual farms to the development of longer-tern natural resource management techniques for entire landscapes. But technologies of practices with a long lag time between investment and...

To examine aspirations in rural Pakistan, we carried out an aspirations module with almost 5,000 individuals as part of a comprehensive household survey. Using respondents’ answers to questions about their aspirations in four dimensions (income, wealth, education, and social status), we...

This paper uses a longitudinal data set from rural Bangladesh to analyze the factors that affect men's and women's ability to participate in groups and to engage in relationships with powerful and influential people. Unlike studies from other countries that find group membership to be positively...

Participating in and presenting gifts at funerals, weddings, and other ceremonies held by fellow villagers have been regarded as social norms in Chinese villages for thousands of years. However, it is more burdensome for the poor to take part in these social occasions than for the rich. Because...

Evidence-based research is widely recognized as an essential input in effective economic policymaking. However, for the results of their research to influence policy, the research community must overcome a variety of challenges, including the absence of adequate and relevant data, differences of...

It has been widely documented that the poor spend a significant proportion of their income on gifts even at the expense of basic consumption. We test three competing explanations of this phenomenon—peer effect, status concern, and risk pooling—based on a census-type primary household survey...

In this study we focus on exclusion from job contact networks, which constitutes a major disadvantage for labor market participants in settings where referral hiring is common and information about jobs hard to obtain. In a mid-size town in northern Ethiopia, where these mechanisms are at work,...