Information problems are pervasive in developing economies and can hinder productivity growth. This paper studies how much rural producers in developing countries can learn from their own experience to redress important information gaps. It builds a model of learning from experience and applies...

This paper tests the linkage between a binary treatment (rural road improvement project) and a continuous outcome (cotton productivity) in Zambia's agro-based Eastern Province as measured by repeated cross-sections of farm-level data from the Zambian post-harvest survey (PHS). We use this PHS...

This paper investigates the dynamic impacts of rural road improvements on farm productivity and crop choices in Zambia's Eastern Province. There are several channels through which the feeder road improvements impact on farmers. Our aim is to estimate whether the differential outcomes in the five...

In the middle of the nineties the rural population in Burkina Faso was seriously hit by rising food prices. Whereas cotton farmers were able to cope with this shock given the simultaneous boom in the cotton sector, food crop farmers had to withdraw children from school and to let them work more...

Central banks in developing countries, wanting to devalue the domestic currency, usually intervene in the foreign exchange market by buying up foreign currency using domestic money-often backing this up with sterilization to counter inflationary pressures. Such interventions are usually...

This paper provides the first firm-level econometric evidence on the skill-bias of ICT in developing countries using a unique new dataset of manufacturing firms in Brazil and India. I use detailed information on firms’ adoption of ICT and the educational composition of their workforce to...

Access to safe water is necessary for lives and livelihoods. In India, a mid-term assessment reveals that the country has already met its MDG (Millennium Development Goal) in terms of expanding access to water infrastructure although in the parallel subsector of sanitation progress is falling...