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...

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...

In Malawi, only 5% of parents state that the right age for a woman to marry is below 18, but 42% of girls get married before they reach that legal age. We document that social image concerns are likely an important mechanism behind that wedge: where the prevalence of child marriage is high,...

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...