This paper presents evidence on the effects of access to domestic and international markets on per capita consumption of households using data from rural China. The econometric analysis uses alternative identification schemes to address the potential endogeneity of access to markets. We use...

Governments provide public information to reduce information imperfections. Do households rely on public signals to inform themselves about market conditions? To identify the importance of public information in households' price expectations, we take advantage of a unique natural experiment in...

This paper provides empirical evidence of an U-shaped causal relationship between the extent of the market (size of the relevant urban market) and the pattern of crop specialization in a village economy. We use the recent two-stage estimator developed by <link>Lewbel (2012)</link> and exploit...

Using two surveys from Bangladesh, this paper provides evidence on the effects of microfinance competition on village moneylender interest rates and households’ dependence on informal credit. The views among practitioners diverge sharply: proponents claim that MFI competition reduces both the...

This paper takes advantage of a rich firm level data set from Ecuador to analyze the effects of a reform in 2007 that introduced imprisonment for tax evasion and made a firm’s CFO liable for tax-crimes. Our dataset contains actual tax-return and financial-statement information for the universe...

We use firm-level administrative data from Ecuador to study the implications of 'reverse withholding' for firms' tax behavior. Withholding does not affect tax liability of firms, but it may result in a discontinuity in the audit probability around the withholding threshold. Exploiting variation...

Using two surveys from Bangladesh, this paper provides evidence on the effects of microfinance competition on village moneylender interest rates and households⣠dependence on informal credit. The views among practitioners diverge sharply: proponents claim that MFI competition reduces both the...

This paper provides an analysis of potential unequal burden of bribery in schools on poor households in developing countries. The rich are more likely to pay bribes in the standard model where the probability of punishment for bribe taking by a teacher is the same irrespective of income of the...

The existing theoretical analysis of microfinance focuses on the nature of the loan contract such as group liability. We draw attention to the role of missing or imperfect labor market in understanding some of the important `second generation' debates in microfinance. Our analysis helps explain...

Using household data from Vietnam, we provide evidence on the effects of education on freedom of spouse choice. We use war disruptions and spatial indicators of schooling supply as instruments. The point estimates indicate that a year of additional schooling reduces the probability of an...