In this paper we aim at studying to what extent spillovers between firms may foster economic growth. The attention is addressed to the spillovers connected with the R&D activity that improves the quality of the goods firms supply. Our model develops a growth theory framework and we assume that...

We study the effect of individual exposure to civil conflict on trust and preferences for market participation. We conducted behavioral experiments and surveys among 426 randomly selected individuals more than a decade after the end of the Tajik civil war. We find that exposure to violence...

An important question to microfinance is the relevance of existing social capital in target communities to the performance of group lending. This research presents evidence from field experiments in South Africa and Armenia, in which subjects participate in trust games and a microfinance game....

We design an artefactual field experiment to study the relationship between joint-liability lending and adverse selection, moral hazard and risk preferences. While theories concerning joint-liability lending have highlighted its ability to mitigate adverse selection in credit transactions, our...

We design an experiment to examine the causal effect of legal institutional quality on informal norms of cooperation, and study the interaction of institutions and culture in sustaining economic exchange. 346 subjects in Italy and Kosovo play a market game under different and randomly allocated...

Our research provides experimental and survey evidence on the pro-social behavior (trust, reciprocity, a sense of fairness) and preferences for anonymous market transactions of former combatants. Our results, from a random sample in post-war Tajikistan, show that trust, reciprocity, generosity...

Recent studies have reported surprising increases in pro-social behavior following exposure to conflict. However, our research provides cautionary evidence of some important detrimental effects of conflict hidden within an overall trend toward increasing certain pro-social preferences. We draw...

Does social capital matter to economic decision-making? We address this broad question through an artefactual group lending experiment carried out in five countries: India, Kenya, Guatemala, Armenia, and the Philippines, obtaining data on 10,673 contribution decisions from 1,554 subjects in 259...