The impacts of COVID-19 reach far beyond the hundreds of thousands of lives lost to the disease; in particular, the pre-existing learning crisis is expected to be magnified during school shutdown. Despite efforts to put distance learning strategies in place, the threat of student dropouts,...

Entrepreneurship is usually identified as an important determinant of aggregate productivity and long-term growth. The determinants of entrepreneurship, nevertheless, are not entirely understood. A recent literature has linked entrepreneurship to the development of the justice system. This paper...

Informational interventions have been shown to significantly change behavior across a variety of settings. Is that because they lead subjects to merely update beliefs in the right direction? Or, alternatively, is it to a large extent because they increase the salience of the decision they...

Poverty focuses attention on present needs. Does that mean that poor parents respond inefficiently to future returns on investments in their children's human capital - even when they would have the financial means to invest optimally? We study this question in the context of an educational...

Do people conform to social norms at least partly to signal their social preferences? Using a vignette experiment, we find that parents who do not marry off their under-age daughters in Malawian villages where child marriage is prevalent are perceived as less altruistic, reciprocal, and...

Teacher absenteeism and shirking are common problems in developing countries. While monitoring teachers should ameliorate those problems, mobilizing parents to do so often leads to small or even negative effects on learning outcomes. This paper provides causal evidence that this might result...

This paper uses a lab-in-the-field experiment in Malawi to document two new facts about how parents share resources with their children over time. First, for almost a third of study participants, the further in the future consumption is, the more generous are parents' plans to share it with...

Entrepreneurship is usually indentified as an important determinant of aggregate productivity and long-term growth. The determinants of entrepreneurship, nevertheless, are not entirely understood. A recent literature has linked entrepreneurship to the development of the justice system. This...

Poverty involves both low income levels and high income uncertainty. Do both these dimensions of being poor capture attention in ways that distort decision-making and trap people in poverty? We examine these issues using real-life shocks faced by farmers in Brazil: random payday variation...

Informational interventions have been shown to significantly change behavior across a variety of settings. Is that because they lead subjects to merely update beliefs in the right direction? Or, alternatively, is it to a large extent because they increase the salience of the decision they...