In this paper we study the determinants of use of formal and informal credit sources. Given that awareness is a necessary step towards use of credit, in order to control for the possible selection bias we decompose the decision to use credit as a two stage decision process in which first,...

Aimed at increasing the adoption rate of older children, Minnesota's 2015 Northstar Care Program eliminated the adoption penalty (the decrease in fostering-based financial transfers associated with adoption) for children aged six and older, while maintaining it for children under age six. Using...

Agriculture can serve as an important engine for economic growth in developing countries, yet yields in these countries have lagged far behind those in developed countries for decades. One potential mechanism for increasing yields is the use of improved agricultural technologies, such as...

Over 755 million adults worldwide are unable to read and write in any language. Yet the widespread introduction of information and communication technology offers new opportunities to provide standardized distance education to underserved illiterate populations in both developed and developing...

Federal initiatives since 1996 have intensified the efforts of states to achieve adoption for children in foster care with the case goal of adoption. For many waiting children, the path to adoption is long. We offer an economic analysis of adoption from foster care, with an emphasis on the...

Primary health care is accepted as the model for delivering basic health care to low income populations in developing countries. Using El Salvador as a case study, the paper draws on three data sets and a qualitative survey to assess health care access and utilization across public and private...

In economic situations a player often has preferences regarding not only his or her own outcome but also regarding what happens to fellow players, concerns that are entirely apart from any strategic considerations. While this can be modeled directly by simply writing down a player's final...

This paper presents a model in which firms recruit both unemployed and employed workers by posting vacancies. Firms act monopsonistically and set wages to retain their existing workers as well as to attract new ones. The model differs from Burdett and Mortensen (1998) in that its assumptions...

We conduct field experiments in a large real-world social network to examine why decision-makers treat their friends more generously than strangers. Subjects are asked to divide a surplus between themselves and named partners at varying social distances, but only one of these decisions is...

We study a small open economy characterized by two empirically important frictions- incomplete financial markets and an inability of the government to commit to policy. We characterize the best sustainable fiscal policy and show that it can amplify and prolong shocks to output. In particular,...