The impact of performance pay in institutions with multiple goals depends on complementarities in the disutility cost of effort and how different tasks interact to achieve each goal. Workers of a mission-oriented nonprofit were randomly assigned to one of two bonus schemes, each incentivizing...

This paper identifies the relative importance of human and physical capital for entrepreneurship. A subset of rural microfinance clients were offered eight full time days of business training and the opportunity to participate in a loan lottery of up to Rs. 100,000 (USD 1,700), about seven times...

Weather is a key source of income risk, especially in emerging market economies. This paper uses a randomized controlled trial involving Indian farmers to study how an innovative rainfall insurance product affects production decisions. The authors find that insurance provision induces farmers to...

This paper reports the results of a field experiment that randomly assigned smallholder cash crop farmers formal savings accounts. In collaboration with a microfinance institution in Malawi, the authors tested two primary treatments, offering either: 1) "ordinary" accounts, or 2) both ordinary...

How do borrowers respond to improvements in a lender's ability to punish defaulters? This paper reports the results of a randomized field experiment in rural Malawi that examines the impact of fingerprinting borrowers in a context where a unique identification system is absent. Fingerprinting...

This paper uses a randomized controlled trial to study the effects of access to agent banking. Individuals were encouraged to open an account and transact at a banking agent or a branch of a financial institution. Compared with individuals who were sent to the branch, individuals sent to an...