Poverty and mortality are arguably the two major sources of loss of well-being. Most mainstream measures of human development capturing these two dimensions aggregate them in an ad-hoc and controversial way. This paper develops a new index aggregating the poverty and the mortality observed in a...

This paper is intended to bridge the theoretical literature describing efficient intra-household behaviour and the development literature that collects empirical regularities pointing toward the existence of strategic decision-making among spouses. It examines the key elements of the collective...

This paper analyzes the possibility of investment coordination leading to outcomes which dominate non-investment equilibria in the presence of monopolistic competition. We establish when complementarity leads to investment coordination failures and explore the welfare implications of coordinated...

In recent years, microfinance institutions have expanded into group lending with individual liability, leaving out the joint liability clause which was an important feature in earlier lending contracts. Recent experimental evidence indicates that group lending may yield benefits, specifically...

Informal groups cannot rely on external enforcement to insure that members abide by their obligations. It is generally assumed that these problems are solved by social sanctions and reputational effects. The present paper focuses on roscas, one of the most commonly found informal financial...