A considerable and increasing share of foreign aid stems from private donations. Hence, individual donors can increase social welfare in developing countries by directing their funds to the most effective NGOs. Surprisingly few studies have analyzed whether private donors care about aid...

For the past two decades, studies measuring social preferences in developing settings have played an important role in building our understanding of economic development and poverty. This book chapter reviews lab-in-the-field experiments that measure social preferences, summarizes categories of...

Successful development programs rely on people to behave and choose in certain ways, and behavioral economics helps us understand why people behave and choose as they do. Approaching problems in development using behavioral economics thus leads to better diagnosis and to better-designed...

Free distribution of a technology can be an effective development policy instrument if its adoption is socially inefficient and hampered by affordability constraints. Improved cookstoves may be such a case: they generate high environmental and public health returns, but adoption is generally...

Free distribution of a technology can be an effective development policy instrument if its adoption is socially inefficient and hampered by affordability constraints. Improved cookstoves may be such a case: they generate high environmental and public health returns, but adoption is generally...

We summarize evidence from the growing body of randomized evaluations on health in developing countries from the perspective of the human capital investment model, cost-effectiveness analysis, and behavioral economics. Many cost-effective methods of infectious disease prevention have limited...

While Randomized Controlled Trials and lab-in-the-field experiments have become more common in development economics in recent years, the rigor and control of laboratory-based experiments has so far been difficult to access in developing countries. Here we describe the use of various cognitive...

In development policy and practice, support to or interventions in value chains are considered to be instrumental for achieving outcomes such as poverty alleviation. This paper reviews methodological discussions on how to show the effects and workings of value chain support in a context of...

In development policy and practice, support to or interventions in value chains are considered to be instrumental for achieving outcomes such as poverty alleviation. This paper reviews methodological discussions on how to show the effects and workings of value chain support in a context of...

In the past decade, nearly 20 studies have found a strong, persistent pattern in surveys and behavioral experiments from over 40 countries: individual exposure to war violence tends to increase social cooperation at the local level, including community participation and prosocial behavior. Thus...