Voter education campaigns often aim to increase political participation and accountability. We followed a randomized campaign against electoral violence sponsored by an international NGO during the 2007 Nigerian elections. This paper investigates whether the effects of the campaign were...

A widely held view among the public is that trade liberalization increases unemployment. Using state and industry-level unemployment and trade protection data from India, we find no evidence of any unemployment increasing effect of trade reforms. In fact, our state-level analysis reveals that...

In developing economies, the fraction of informal workers can be as high as 70% of total employment. For economies with significant informal sectors, business cycle fluctuations and labor market policy interventions can have important effects not only on the unemployment rate, but also on the...

Social networks can affect demand for human capital investments by relaxing household time or budget constraints or by defining and reinforcing human capital preferences. However, empirically identifying the effect of social networks on human capital investment is usually problematic because...

We examine the impact of informal risk sharing on risk taking incentives when transfers are organized through a social network. A bilateral partial sharing rule satisfies that neighbors share equally a part of their revenue. In such a society, correlated technologies generate interdependent risk...

Access to credit is important for the productivity and overall welfare of farmers in developing countries. We present a theoretical framework which shows that a change in the mode of shipping (from air to sea) in the Ghanaian pineapple industry made it profitable for pineapple exporters to...

This paper examines the role of contracting institutions on a multinational firm's optimal ownership strategy. We develop a model in which both a multinational firm and its local joint venture partner can ex post engage in costly rent-seeking actions to increase their ex ante agreed upon revenue...

This paper examines the determinants of vertical integration versus outsourcing in export processing, by exploiting the coexistence of two export processing regimes in China, which designate by law who owns and controls the imported components. Based on a variant of the Antràs-Helpman (2004)...

This paper studies changes over time in the incidence of labor tying. The existingliterature is successful in explaining the emergence of this institution, but contains thecounterfactual implication that there should be an increasing trend in labor tying. However,previous contributions have so...

Despite a theoretical literature that promises that land transfers will have large impacts on the well-being of poor households, well-identified empirical evidence on the efficacy of land redistribution is scarce. In an effort to fill this gap, this paper examines South Africa's Land...