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Financing Smallholder Agriculture: An Experiment with Agent-Intermediated Microloans in India

Motta, Alberto; Maitra, Pushkar; Mitra, Sandip; … - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2014

Recent evaluations of traditional microfinance loans have found no significant impacts on borrower incomes or productive activities. We examine whether this can be remedied by (a) modifying loan features to facilitate financing of working capital needs of farmers, and (b) delegating selection of...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011085479

A Personal Touch: Text Messaging for Loan Repayment

Karlan, Dean; Zinman, Jonathan; Morten, Melanie - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2012

We worked with two microlenders to test impacts of randomly assigned reminders for loan repayments in the "text messaging capital of the world". We do not find strong evidence that loss versus gain framing or messaging timing matter. Messages only robustly improve repayment when they include the...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011188547

Risk and Return in Village Economies

Townsend, Robert M.; Samphantharak, Krislert - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2013

We present a framework for the study of risk and return of household enterprise in developing economies. We make predictions from two polar benchmarks: (1) an economy with Pareto optimal allocations under full risk sharing, and (2) an economy in which each autarky household absorbs risk in...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010821669

Risk, Insurance and Wages in General Equilibrium

Rosenzweig, Mark; Mobarak, Ahmed Mushfiq - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2014

We estimate the general-equilibrium labor market effects of a large-scale randomized intervention in which we designed and marketed a rainfall index insurance product across three states in India. Marketing agricultural insurance to both cultivators and to agricultural wage laborers allows us to...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010796570

Does Decentralization Facilitate Access to Poverty-Related Services? Evidence from Benin

Caldeira, Emilie; Foucault, Martial; Rota-Graziosi, … - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2012

We study the effect of decentralization on the access to some poverty-related public services in Benin. Compiling panel … services. Decentralization in Benin contributes positively to the reduction of poverty by improving the average access to … poverty-related services. However, the devil is in the details, as decentralization seems to increase inequality among local …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011271441

Tax Morale

Luttmer, Erzo F.P.; Singhal, Monica - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2014

Standard economic models of tax compliance have focused on enforcement-driven compliance. Notably, tax administrators also tend to place a great deal of emphasis on the importance of improving "tax morale" by encouraging voluntary compliance, creating a culture of compliance, and changing social...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011106586

Does Competition Eliminate Discrimination? Evidence from the Commercial Sex Market in Singapore

Lang, Kevin; Li, Huailu; Leong, Kaiwen - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2015

The street sex worker market in Geylang, Singapore is highly competitive. Clients can search legally at negligible cost. Sex workers discriminate based on client ethnicity despite an excess supply of sex workers. Workers are more (less) likely to approach and ask a higher (lower) price of...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011159881

Revealing Malfeasance: How Local Media Facilitates Electoral Sanctioning of Mayors in Mexico

Snyder, James M. Snyder, Jr.; Larreguy, Horacio A.; … - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2014

We estimate the effect of local media outlets on political accountability in Mexico, focusing on malfeasance by municipal mayors. We study federal grants earmarked for infrastructure projects targeting the poor, and leverage two sources of plausibly exogenous variation. First, we exploit...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011079880

Is India's Manufacturing Sector Moving Away From Cities?

Ghani, Ejaz; Goswami, Arti Grover; Kerr, William R. - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2012

This paper investigates the urbanization of the Indian manufacturing sector by combining enterprise data from formal and informal sectors. We find that plants in the formal sector are moving away from urban and into rural locations, while the informal sector is moving from rural to urban...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011227923

Endogenous Insurance and Informal Relationships

Wang, Xiao Yu - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2014

Heterogeneously risk-averse individuals who lack access to formal insurance build and use relationships with each other to manage risk. I show that the composition of equilibrium relationships under pairwise matching and when group size is endogenous is determined by a mean-variance trade-off...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011186512