Recent literature on tax administration in poor countries suggests that inducing more fiscal corruption may contribute to reducing tax evasion and increasing tax revenues. But does such an intriguing paradox justify policies that stimulate corruption? Our answer is no, and this note puts forward...

Amartya Sen, in his most recent book Development as Freedom, argues that expansion of human freedom should both be viewed as the primary end and the principle means of development. This paper provides an overview and a critical scrutiny of the Senian perspective from the point of view of an...

Why do people in rich countries not transfer more of their income to people in the world's poorest countries? To study this question and the relative importance of needs, entitlements, and nationality in people's social preferences, we conducted a real effort fairness experiment where people in...

Which is the most binding constraint to microenterprise development, human capital or financial capital? To answer this question, we present the first field experiment that jointly investigates these two constraints for poor microentrepreneurs, by introducing separate treatments of business...

There is increased awareness that success among small scale entrepreneurs in developing countries requires more than microfinance, and that an important limiting factor for business growth is the level of human capital among the entrepreneurs. The present paper uses a randomized control trial to...

The anti-corruption reform in the Tanzanian tax bureaucracy in the mid-1990s was apparently a short-lived success. In the wake of the reform, a number of "tax experts" established themselves in the market, many of them being laid off tax bureaucrats. We argue that middle-men can undermine the...