We explore how financial constraints distort the entry decisions among otherwise productive entrepreneurs and limit growth of promising young firms. A model of liquidity-constrained entrepreneurs suggests that the easing of credit constraints can induce more entry of firms with greater long-run...

Persistence of sharecropping tenancy and increases in farm productivity following regulations protecting tenant rights have been observed in many developing countries. This paper examines if these can be explained by alternative models of sharecropping with two sided efforts/investments, namely,...

This paper studies contracting between a principal and multiple agents. The setup is classical except for the assumption that agents have interdependent preferences. We characterize cost effective contracts, and relate the direction of co-movement in rewards -- "joint liability" (positive) or...

We conducted a large-scale field experiment to calibrate phone messaging to its potential of overcoming behavioral barriers to maternal care uptake in the countryside of a developing country, where a significant share of women forgoes life-saving maternity-related care even when within reach....

Building on prior evidence that mothers often have a stronger preference for spending on children than fathers do, we use a randomized experiment to evaluate the impacts of a communication training program for mothers on child health in Uganda. The hypothesis is that the training will enable...

We study the effects of an unconditional cash transfer program on social preferences of children. The program allocated $1,076 to randomly selected households in rural Kenya. We measure the social preferences of 4,022 children from 1,687 households with survey questions and incentivized...

Multiple price lists are a convenient tool to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) in surveys and experiments, but choice patterns such as "multiple switching" and "never switching" indicate high error rates. Existing measurement approaches often do not provide accurate standard errors and cannot...

Living standards measurement surveys require sustained attention for several hours. We quantify survey fatigue by randomizing the order of questions in 2-3 hour-long in-person surveys. An additional hour of survey time increases the probability that a respondent skips a question by 10-64%....

Land market incompleteness is argued to have pervasive effects in Sub-Saharan Africa, including on agricultural efficiency, equity, and structural transformation. Yet experimental evidence on land market participation is virtually non-existent. We randomly allocate subsidies for agricultural...