We study the interplay of inequality and trust in a dynamic game, in which trust increases efficiency and thus allows higher growth of the experimental economy in the future. We find that trust is initially high in a treatment starting with equal endowments, but decreases over time. In a...

Wealth inequality has been growing throughout the world in recent decades. In this article I explore the impact of inequality on risk-management decisions in a developing country context. I use a lab-in-the-field experiment that introduces exogenous variation in inequality to investigate the...

Low income households in agrarian developing economies continue to face considerable livelihood risks, which have serious negative impacts on household welfare. Incomplete financial markets present an external constraint on risk management and are well studied in the literature. A growing...

The gains from insurance arise from the transfer of income across states. Yet, by requiring that the premium be paid upfront, standard insurance products also transfer income across time. We show that this intertemporal transfer can help explain low insurance demand, especially among the poor,...

The mission of microfinance is generally perceived as compensation for the failure of the mainstream financial institutions to deliver access to finance to the poor. Microloan officers have significant influence on microloans allocation as they contact loan applicants and process information...

Is the impact of women's bargaining power on the welfare of the household always positive? We address this question by developing a novel experimental measure of bargaining power over family expenditures in Ivory Coast and studying its determinants. We find that men prioritise food expenditures,...

We run an experiment in Ethiopia where farmers can use their own money to decrease the money of others (money burning). The data support the prediction from an inequality aversion model based on absolute income differences; but there is no support for an inequality aversion model based on...

This paper proposes a novel experimental measure of women's relative bargaining power, relates this measure to expenditures on various household public goods, and studies its determinants. A key question we address in the process is whether higher bargaining power for women translates into...

Many Western countries face the challenge of reconciling future labor demand with growing public opposition to immigration. The dynamics and underlying processes of setting immigration requirements remain unclear as research so far mainly focuses on context-specific empirical studies. We use a...

Many Western countries face the challenge of reconciling future labor demand with growing public opposition to immigration. The dynamics and underlying processes of setting immigration requirements remain unclear as research so far mainly focuses on context-specific empirical studies. We use a...