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...

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...

What are the key determinants of taxpayer compliance? And which features of citizen-state relations govern attitudes and behaviour regarding taxation? This paper examines the analytical foundation, methodological approaches and key findings of available empirical literature on taxpayer behaviour...

There is a move towards more use of engagement strategies in responsible investment. This change in strategies is motivated by a number of claims about the effectiveness of engagement versus exclusion of companies from the investment universe. This paper examines the basis for three central...

We study the deep determinants of occupational choice, with a focus on what appears to be a particularly profitable pathway out of poverty, overseas labor migration. To what extent is this choice constrained by access to economic resources, in contrast to variation in preferences, or...

A unique family survey was conducted in Nepal to investigate the economic consequences of having a first-born girl. Women get more children, but we find no causal effect of number of children on economic outcomes. But independently of the number of children there is a positive effect on boys'...

We investigate whether historic land distribution determines stagnation or development of Indian villages. The empirical analysis is motivated by the Banerjee and Newman (1993) model of occupational choice and economic development. Family histories are collected for a random sample of 800...