"There is a growing belief in development policy circles that participation by local communities in basic service delivery can promote development outcomes. A central plank of public policy for improving primary education services in India is the participation of village education committees...

A wide range of interventions, from subsidized grains all the way to conditions on nutrition in conditional cash transfers, have either been tried or put in place in different countries in order to fight under-nutrition. A number of important policy experiments in recent years, directly or...

This paper examines equilibrium and stability in symmetric two-player cheap-talk games. In particular, we characterize the set of neutrally stable outcomes in finite cheap-talk 2 x 2 coordination games. This set is finite and functionally independent of risk-dominance relations. As the number of...

This paper studies the effects of social network based lending. This is a pervasive phenomenon in most of the developing world. Access to such network capital has an obvious influence on investment. It also influences the pattern of migration since, ceteris paribus, migrants would prefer to be...

The recent East Asian crisis has highlighted the relationship between financial development and output volatility. In this essay we develop a simple model of a small open economy producing a tradeable good using a non-tradeable input and where firms access to borrowings and investment depends on...

This paper introduces a framework for analyzing the role of financial factors as a source of instability in small open economies. Our basic model is a dynamic open economy model with one tradeable and one non-tradeable good with the non-tradeable being an input to the production of the...

This paper analyzes the optimal interest rate policy in currency crises. Firms are credit constrained and have debt in domestic and foreign currency, a situation that may easily lead to a currency crisis. An interest rate increase has an ambiguous effect on firms since it both makes more...