International migration offers individuals and their families the potential to experience immediate and large gains in their incomes, and offers a large number of other positive benefits to the sending communities and countries. However, there are also concerns about potential costs of...

The"tapering talk"starting on May 22, 2013, when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke first spoke of the possibility of the U.S. central bank reducing its security purchases, had a sharp negative impact on emerging markets. India was among those hardest hit. The rupee depreciated by 18 percent...

The adoption of new agricultural technologies may be discouraged because of their inherent riskiness. This study implemented a randomized field experiment to ask whether the provision of insurance against a major source of production risk induces farmers to take out loans to invest in a new crop...

The paper is about the art of exchange rate management by central banks. It begins by reviewing the diversity of objectives and practices of central bank intervention in the foreign exchange market. Central banks typically exercise discretion in determining when and to what extent to intervene....

The decision of whether or not to migrate has far-reaching consequences for the lives of individuals and their families. But the very nature of this choice makes identifying the impacts of migration difficult, since it is hard to measure a credible counterfactual of what the person and their...

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...

The very poor in developing countries often make intertemporal choices that seem at odds with their individual self-interest. There are many possible reasons why. This paper investigates several of these reasons with a lab-in-the-field experiment in rural Malawi involving large stakes. It makes...

This paper investigates the role of fiscal guarantees in promoting infrastructure investment. Infrastructure is a critical driver of economic growth, but infrastructure entails significant up-front costs that yield benefits after a time lag. Investors hesitate to put their money down on private...

As the Eurozone crisis drags on, it is evident that a part of the problem lies in the architecture of debt and its liabilities within the Eurozone and, more generally, the European Union. This paper argues that a large part of the problem can be mitigated by permitting appropriately-structured...