Interventions that aim to change outcomes for women and children typically target women. Yet in contexts where men are the dominant decision-makers, male preferences and beliefs may remain the binding constraint. We ask – when we target men, women or both, with the same intervention in the...

We study the effects on intimate partner violence (IPV) of new information received by women only, men only, or both, relevant to a high-stakes joint household decision. We model communication between spouses as Bayesian persuasion where disagreements elevate the risk of IPV. Our framework...

Women may face systematically greater benefits than men from adopting certain technologies. Yet women often hold lower bargaining power, meaning that men's preferences may constrain household adoption when decisions are joint. When low female bargaining power constrains adoption of the...

Estimates of "present-bias" among the poor may be exaggerated if poor individuals are credit-constrained and expect to have greater liquidity in the future. I conduct an experiment in rural Pakistan which provides causal evidence of this effect. I use windfalls to generate fully exogenous...

There is a large gender gap in the likelihood of taking maths and physics at A-level, even among high-achieving pupils. Among pupils who achieved grade A or A* (equivalent to grades 7-9) in GCSE maths in 2010, 36.5% of girls compared to 51.1% of boys took maths A-level. Among those who achieved...

Most evidence of hyperbolic discounting is based on violations of either stationarity or time consistency as observed in choice experiments. These choice reversals may however also result from time-varying discount rates. Hyperbolic discounting is a plausible explanation for choice reversals...

Impact evaluations of development programmes usually focus on a comparison of participants with a control group. However, if the programme generates externalities for non-participants such an approach will capture only part of the programme’s impact. Based on a unique large-scale quantitative...

Health shocks are among the most important unprotected risks for microfinance clients, but the take-up of micro health insurance typically remains limited. This pa- per attributes low enrollment rates to a social dilemma. Our theory is that in jointly liable groups, insurance is a public good....

Background: Health insurance enrolment in many Sub-Saharan African countries is low, even with highly subsidized premiums and exemptions for vulnerable populations. This paper evaluates the impact of a community engagement intervention implemented in Ghana with the aim of improving clients’...

This research assesses how low-income households in Western Kenya coped with the immediate economic consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak. It uses granular financial data from weekly household interviews covering six weeks before the first case was detected in Kenya to five weeks after. Our...