Community mobilization is a key feature of community-based development projects. Community mobilization requires facilitating communication between village members and between leaders and the rest of the community. Is communication an effective device through which mobilization may foster...

Youth training programs and their evaluations are ubiquitous, yet there is relatively little evidence on the mechanisms through which they operate and their effect on outcomes beyond the labor market. This is the motivation of our study of entra21 , a job training program for low income youth in...

We study the effect of a job training program for low income youth in Cordoba, Argentina. The program included life-skills and vocational training, as well as internships with private sector employers. Participants were allocated by means of a public lottery. We rely on administrative data on...

Mali has introduced a program to produce biodiesel using jatropha, a shrub widely available throughout the country. The aim of the program is to partially substitute diesel, which is entirely supplied through imports, with domestically produced biodiesel. In this paper, we use a computable...

A common premise in both the theoretical and policy literatures on development is that people remain poor because they are too impatient to save and too risk averse to take the sort of chances needed to accumulate wealth. The empirical literature, however, suggests that this assumption is far...

Both men and women wish to have a family and a rewarding career. In this paper, we show that the under-representation of women in high-powered professions may reflect a coordination failure in young women?s marriage-timing decisions. Since investing in a highpowered career imposes time strain,...

The distribution of income within the household is found to matter for the allocation of resources towards nutrition. Rural Mexican households do not pool income, nor do they attain a Pareto-efficient allocation of resources. In contrast to what is commonly done in the literature, I do not...

We provide new results regarding the identification of peer effects. We consider an extended version of the linear-in-means model where each individual has his own specific reference group. Interactions are thus structured through a social network. We assume that correlated unobservables are...

We provide the first empirical application of a new approach proposed by Lee (2007) to estimate peer effects in a linear-in-means model. This approach allows to control for group-level unobservables and to solve the reflection problem. We investigate peer effects in student achievement in...