First draft: February 1996. This draft: November 1996. <p> Drawing insights from survey work on enterprise finance and from the literature on credit and labor markets, this paper investigates the spontaneous emergence of markets in the presence of heterogeneous agents and commitment failure. We...</p>

March 1997 <p> This paper tests the efficiency of insurance markets in the Pakistan Punjab by examining how crop choices are affected by the presence of price and yield risk. We estimate reduced-form and structural models of crop choices. Although we cannot reject the hypothesis that village...</p>

Using original data on gifts and loans, this paper investigates how rural Filipino households deal with income and expenditure shocks. Results indicate that gifts and informal loans are partly motivated by consumption smoothing motives but do not serve to efficiently share risk. Certain shocks...

Households in the west African semi-arid tropics face substantial risk -- an inevitable consequence of engaging in rainfed agriculture in a drought-prone environment. It has long been hypothesized that these households keep livestock as a buffer stock to insulate their consumption from income...

Standard models of investment predict that credit-constrained firms should grow rapidly when given additional capital, and that how this capital is provided should not affect decisions to invest in the business or consume the capital. The authors randomly gave cash and in-kind grants to male-...

Using detailed geographical and household survey data from Nepal, this article investigates the relationship between isolation and subjective welfare. This is achieved by examining how distance to markets and proximity to large urban centers are associated with responses to questions about...

Fafchamps, Hamine, and Zeufack test two alternative models of learning to export: productivity learning, whereby firms learn to reduce production costs, and market learning, whereby firms learn to design products that appeal to foreign consumers. Using panel and cross-section data on Moroccan...

Central place theory predicts that agglomeration can arise from external shocks. This paper investigates whether gold mining is a catalyst for proto-urbanization in rural Ghana. Using cross-sectional data, the analysis finds that locations within 10 kilometers from gold mines have more night...

A business plan competition is conducted to test whether survey instruments or panel judges are able to identify the fastest growing firms. Participants submitted six-to eight-page business plans and defended them before a three-or four-judge panel. Applicants are surveyed shortly after they...