This working paper by CGD non-resident fellow Dean Karlan explores whether group liability in lending practices improves lender's overall profitability and the poor's access to financial markets. Group liability is a common microcredit lending mechanism that makes a group, rather than an...

Using a sample of 20 OECD countries it is shown that the majority of countries decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution in the first pillar of their pension systems, though the evidence is weak in statistical terms. We find strong correlations between changes of the so-called...

We present an analysis of the economic, political and social factors that underlay the Apollo program, one of the most exceptional and costly projects ever undertaken by the United States in peacetime that culminated in 1969 with the first human steps on the Moon. This study suggests that the...

The research reported here sought to identify top managers' mental models about the management of diversification and to determine whether these beliefs are associated with important strategic decisions. The study identified three broad sets of beliefs or orientations about the management of...

Good governance by institutional fund asset owners makes a significant incremental difference to value creation as measured by their long-term risk-adjusted rate of return. Drawing upon best-practice case studies, it is argued that the principles of good governance can be summarised by...

Recent literature on economic development and poverty has stressed the issue of property rights, informal institutions and their relationship with capital markets. This paper intends to model some aspects of economist Hernando De Soto's work on informality, particularly how does the...

Dutta, Jackson and Le Breton (Econometrica, 2001) initiates the study of strategic candidacy. A voting procedure satisfies candidate stability if no candidate has incentives to withdraw her candidacy in order to manipulate the voting outcome in her favor. Dutta et al. (2001) shows that a single...

This paper examines the role of local housing market conditions for social capital accumulation and neighborhood club good provision. A model of individual investment decisions predicts that in a setting with high property transaction costs (i) homeowners are more likely to invest in social...

We study option management by committee. Analysis is illustrated by tenure decisions. Our innovations are two-fold: we treat the committee's problem as one of social choice, not information aggregation; and we endogenise the outside option: rejecting a candidate at either the probationary or...

We consider situations where a society allocates a finite units of an indivisible good among agents, and each agent receives at most one unit of the good. For example, imagine that a government allocates a fixed number of licences to private firms, or imagine that a government distributes...