Since the early 1990s, a large number of studies have been undertaken to understand the causes and consequences of corruption. Many of these studies have employed firm-level survey data from various countries. While insightful, these analyses based on firm-level surveys have largely ignored two...

Deliberative decision-making processes are becoming increasingly important around the world to make important decisions about public and private goods allocation, but there is very little empirical evidence about how they actually work. In this paper the authors use data from India extracted...

Although there has been considerable recent interest in micro-credit programs, rigorous evidence on the impacts of forming self-help groups to mobilize savings and foster social empowerment at the local level is virtually non-existent, despite a large number of programs following this pattern....

This paper explores the social capital impacts of a large-scale, community-driven development project in the Philippines in which communities competed for block grants for infrastructure investment. The analysis uses a unique data set of about 2,100 households collected before the project...

In response to the problems of high coordination costs among the poor, efforts are underway in many countries to organize the poor through"self-help groups"(SHGs) -- membership-based organizations that aim to promote social cohesion through a mixture of education, access to finance, and linkages...