How does international trade affect the popularity of governments and leaders? The recent backlash against globalization renders this question extremely topical. Yet, most previous work has looked for political effects of aggregate trade flows without decomposing into particular types of...

International climate negotiations have been troubled by mutual mistrust. At the same time, a hope seems to prevail that once enough countries moved forward, others would follow suit. If the abatement game faced by climate negotiators is a Prisoners' Dilemma, and countries are narrowly...

Using detailed time-use data for seven industrialized countries from the 1970s until today we document general decreases in men's market work coupled with increases in men's unpaid work and child care, and increases in women's paid work and child care coupled with decreases in unpaid work. We...

BRAC, a non-governmental organization (NGO), runs a large number of non-formal primary schools in Bangladesh which target out-of-school children from poor families. These schools are well-known for their effectiveness in closing gender gap in primary school enrollment. On the other hand,...

We develop a model of regulation of service-delivery NGOs, where future grants are conditional on prior spending of some minimal proportion of current revenue on direct project-related expenses. Such regulation induces some NGOs to increase current project spending, but imposes wasteful costs of...

Non-formal schools play an increasingly important role in the delivery of educational services in poor communities, but little systematic evidence is available about their placement choices. We study location choice of "one teacher, one classroom" non-formal primary schools pioneered by BRAC...

We examine the case for donors providing financial incentives to NGOs to increase community participation. We show that, when such incentives are provided, there need not exist any meaningful relationship between beneficiary welfare and the extent of community participation implemented by an...

This paper shows that cross country differences in the generosity and the quality of the welfare state are associated with differences in the trustworthiness of their citizens. We show that generous, transparent and efficient welfare states in Scandinavian countries are based on the civicness of...

Social experiments are powerful sources of information about the effectiveness of interventions. In practice, initial randomization plans are almost always compromised. Multiple hypotheses are frequently tested. "Significant" effects are often reported with p-values that do not account for...