The fundamental problem of external validity is not to generalize from one experiment, so much as to experimentally test generalizable theories. That is, theories that explain the systematic variation of causal effects across contexts. Here we show how the graphical language of causal diagrams...

Prior to 2009, there was no direct road connection between the southern regions of Mozambique - where the capital city is located - and the more agriculturally-productive central and northern regions. In this paper, we leverage the opening of a major road bridge to identify the impact of...

This paper presents a framed field experiment on ecological altruism in Mindoro, Philippines. Behavioural differences between ethnic groups in Mindoro-the Tagalogs and the Mangyans-were investigated. We designed a two-part donation task (i.e. dictator game) where the recipient of the donation...

What motivates individuals to become politicians? This is an important question in decentralized democracies, where local politicians play a key role in public goods provision. However, and in emerging economies, bureaucratic hurdles and administrative failures introduce uncertainty about the...

Implicit associations and biases are carried without awareness of conscious direction. In this paper, I develop a model to study giving behaviours under conditions of implicit bias. I test this model by implementing a novel laboratory experiment - a Dictator Game with sorting to study both these...

In emerging economies, pro-social policy outcomes may be prevented by bureaucratic inefficiency, capture by elected or non-elected office holders, or by other hurdles. For local citizens, uncertainty about the true cause of such failures often prevails. We study the pro-sociality of politicians'...

We present a unified structural equation modelling framework for the regression-based decomposition of rank-dependent indicators of socioeconomic inequality of health and compare it with a simple ordinary least squares regression. The structural equation modelling framework forms the basis for a...

Based on China Household Income Project rural data, this paper aims to study the changes of rural household income mobility in transitional China. The results show that with the economic reform and development, income mobility between 2007 and 2009 was much stronger than before. Regarding the...

A recent trend in the study of poverty is to consider a relative poverty line, one that is responsive to the nature of the income distribution. We develop an axiomatic approach to the determination of an amalgam poverty line. Given a reference income (e.g. the mean or the median), the amalgam...

In Sub-Saharan Africa we find some of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. Nevertheless, we generally know very little about the historical development of inequality. In this paper we look at how inequality developed in colonial and post-colonial Botswana. We show that income...