We develop a dynamic game to explore the interaction between regulation and private policies, such as self-regulation … by firms and activism. Without a public regulator, the possibility of self-regulation is bad for the firm, but good for … activists who are willing to maintain a costly boycott to raise the likelihood of self-regulation. Results are reversed when the …

Regulation consists of rulemaking and enforcement. Economic theory offers two complementary rationales for regulating … arise in multi- party relationships and that regulation introduces opportunities to impose rules that enhance the welfare of … discretion and choose actions for the common good. Agency-cost theories portray regulation as a way to raise the quality of …

, India, we find that "gung ho entrepreneurs" (GEs), households who were already running a business before microfinance …

networks. We first study 75 villages in Karnataka, 43 of which were exposed to microfinance after we first collected detailed … microfinance are at least as likely to disappear as links involving likely borrowers. We replicate these surprising findings in the … context of a randomized controlled trial in Hyderabad, where a microfinance institution randomly selected neighborhoods to …

of microfinance. Random variation in the frequency of mandatory meetings across first-time borrower groups generates …

In October 2010, the state government of Andhra Pradesh, India issued an emergency ordinance, bringing microfinance … loans in the affected state. We use this massive dislocation in the microfinance market to identify the causal impacts of a … sector (agriculture), suggesting that one important impact of the microfinance contraction was transmitted through its effect …

Recent evaluations of traditional microfinance loans have found no significant impacts on borrower incomes or …

-based lending product in a new market. In 2005, half of 104 slums in Hyderabad, India were randomly selected for opening of a branch … of a particular microfinance institution (Spandana) while the remainder were not, although other MFIs were free to enter …. We found no changes in any of the development outcomes that are often believed to be affected by microfinance, including …

Group lending has been widely adopted in the past thirty years by many microfinance institutions as a means to mitigate … estimate the model using a rich dataset from a group lending program in India. The estimation results support our model …

In collaboration with a state environmental regulator in India, we conducted a field experiment to raise the frequency … these results and recover the full costs of environmental regulation, we model the regulatory process as a dynamic discrete … costs of environmental regulation are largely reserved for extremely polluting plants. Applying the cost estimates to the …