The current banking crisis highlights the challenges faced in the traditional lending model, particularly in terms of screening smaller borrowers. The recent growth in online peer-to-peer lending marketplaces offers opportunities to examine different lending models that rely on screening by...

Learning persistence plays a central role in models of skill formation, estimates of education production functions, and evaluations of educational programs. In non-experimental settings, estimated impacts of educational inputs can be highly sensitive to correctly specifying persistence when...

Evaluations of educational programs commonly assume that what children learn persists over time. The authors compare learning in Pakistani public and private schools using dynamic panel methods that account for three key empirical challenges to widely used value-added models: imperfect...

We construct the topology of business networks across the population of firms in an emerging economy, Pakistan, and estimate the value that membership in large yet diffuse networks brings in terms of access to bank credit and improving financial viability. We link two firms if they have a common...

Learning persistence plays a central role in models of skill formation, estimates of education production functions, and evaluations of educational programs. In non-experimental settings, estimated impacts of educational inputs can be highly sensitive to correctly specifying persistence when...

This paper provides a description of the recent decentralization reforms in Pakistan under General Musharraf. In the process, we hope to not only highlight major aspects of this reform, but also to analyze the evolution of this reform in historical context in order to better understand the...

The partition of India in 1947 along ostensibly religious lines into India, Pakistan, and what eventually became Bangladesh resulted in one of the largest and most rapid migrations in human history. We compile district level census data from archives to quantify the scale of migratory flows...

We estimate the impact on pilgrims of performing the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Our method compares successful and unsuccessful applicants in a lottery used by Pakistan to allocate Hajj visas. Pilgrim accounts stress that the Hajj leads to a feeling of unity with fellow Muslims, but outsiders...

The current banking crisis highlights the challenges faced in the traditional lending model, particularly in terms of screening smaller borrowers. The recent growth in online peer-to-peer lending marketplaces offers opportunities to examine different lending models that rely on screening by...

Evaluations of educational programs commonly assume that what children learn persists over time. The authors compare learning in Pakistani public and private schools using dynamic panel methods that account for three key empirical challenges to widely used value-added models: imperfect...