Regulation of goods associated with negative environmental externalities may decrease consumption of the targeted product, but may be ineffective at reducing the externality itself if close substitutes are left unregulated. We find evidence that plastic bag bans, the most common disposable bag...

We study the consequences of dynamic complementarities in the production of child human capital for the relationship between risk and schooling investment in a low income setting. In contrast to previous literature, we explore the ex ante response of schooling to risk. We develop a model that...

This paper seeks to explain the U-shaped relationship between farm productivity and farm scale - the initial fall in productivity as farm size increases from its lowest levels and the continuous upward trajectory as scale increases after a threshold - observed across the world and in low-income...

We investigate the link between hospital performance and managerial education by collecting a large database of management practices and skills in hospitals across nine countries. We find that hospitals that are closer to universities offering both medical education and business education have...

A public employment program's effect on poverty depends on both program earnings and market impacts. We estimate this composite effect, exploiting a large-scale randomized experiment across 157 sub-districts and 19 million people that improved the implementation of India's employment guarantee....

Self-control problems constitute a potential explanation for the under-investment in preventive health care observed in low-income countries. A commonly proposed policy tool to solve such problems is offering consumers commitment devices. We conduct a field experiment to evaluate the...

This paper studies how aggregate economic conditions affect marriage markets in developing countries where marriage is regulated by traditional customary norms. We examine how local economic shocks influence the timing of marriage, and particularly child marriage, in Sub-Saharan Africa and in...

Social network data is often prohibitively expensive to collect, limiting empirical network research. Typical economic network mapping requires (1) enumerating a census, (2) eliciting the names of all network links for each individual, (3) matching the list of social connections to the census,...

Developing countries made considerable gains during the first decade of the 21st century. Their economies grew at unprecedented rates, resulting in large reductions in extreme poverty and a significant expansion of the middle class. But more recently that progress has slowed with an economic...