This article evaluates the impact of a land certification program on credit market outcomes in rural Vietnam. We hypothesize that the representation of property increases households' participation in formal credit markets. We compare credit market outcomes for certified and non-certified...

We conducted a field experiment with real-life tenants in Ethiopia to test the incentive effects of fixed-wage, sharecropping, fixed-rent, and ownership contracts. The experimental task resembles a common process in agricultural production. The sharecropping contract is essentially a piece-rate...

Limited attention may play a role in explaining the inability to reach savings goals (Karlan, McConnell, Mullainathan and Zinman, forthcoming). Presuming that attention is a scarce resource and important for the pursuit of saving plans, limits to attention in inter-temporal consumption and...

Asymmetric information impairs the functioning of credit markets, in particular in developing countries where incomplete property rights and lack of collateral are a common joint occurrence. In such an environment financial institutions enable lending by transferring the responsibilities for the...

The presentation analyzes whether the success of persuasive messages depends on an individual's behavioral bias: If at the onset of a savings period saving goals are chosen with over- or underconfidence, i.e. individuals over- or underestimate their savings potential, individuals might save too...

This study examines whether cultural norms arising from traditional agricultural practices affect the formation of gender-specific skills. We hypothesize that a culturally induced division of labor along gender lines generates gender-specific skills. As opposed to the traditional measurement of...

One of the central hypotheses of the neoclassical growth literature is the balanced- growth hypothesis, which predicts that output, consumption, and investment grow at the same rate. Empirically, this implies that the consumption-to-output ratio and the investment-to-output ratio must be...