Trust is crucial for successful collective action. A prime example is collective commercialization of agricultural produce through producer organizations. We conduct a cluster-randomized controlled trial in rural Senegal in which we vary the number and the type of smallholder farmers - members...

A series of observations on various types of cooperatives is constructed from intermittent surveys between 1920 and 1950 and, where possible, these are extended to recent years. These observations allow several questions to be taken up: how well have organizations that resemble consumers'...

This paper evaluates the impact of the Purchase 4 Progress (P4P) intervention implemented by World Food Program in Ethiopia on per capita income as well as across sub-social groups. The intervention is intended to improve the market power of smallholder farmers through cooperatives that has the...

Brazil was characterised by a marked process of trade liberalisation in the 1990s, resulting in a dramatic increase in the volumes of exports and imports since the year 2000. Over the same period, the relative demand for skilled labour has increased substantially. To investigate whether these...

We analyze the impact of child labor on school achievement using Brazilian school achievement test data from the 2003 Sistema Nacional de Avaliação da Educação Básica (SAEB). We control for the endogeneity of child labor using instrumental variable techniques, where the instrumental...

This paper analyzes the determinants of local institutions and distribution of political power within a constant 'macro-institutional' setting. We show that characteristics of Brazilian municipalities related to institutional quality and distribution of political power are partly inherited from...

This paper provides new evidence on the wage gap between informal and formal salary workers in South Africa, Brazil and Mexico. We use rich datasets that allow us to define informality in a relatively comparable fashion across countries. We compute precise wage differentials by accounting for...

This paper estimates the consequences of the decline of the Brazilian manufacturing sector for displaced workers. I estimate that earnings decline by nearly 50% after displacement relative to one year prior. About a quarter of the initial earnings loss is attributable to reduced hours of work...

This paper uses a unique new data set on nearly a thousand manufacturing firms in Brazil and India to investigate the determinants of ICT adoption and its impact on performance in both countries. The descriptive evidence shows that Brazilian firms on average use ICT more intensively than their...

We provide evidence about the determinants of the wage structures of developing countries by examining the case of Brazil. Our specific question is whether Brazil's dramatic income and wage differentials can be explained by the division of rents between firms and their employees, unlike in...