Specialization and commercialization of agricultural production is seen as a key to lift small-scale farmers in developing countries out of poverty. While participation in high-value markets has been shown to be beneficial for farmers, especially the smallest and least endowed farmers are often...

Previous research shows that collective action to avoid a catastrophic threshold, such as a climate "tipping point", is unaffected by uncertainty about the impact of crossing the threshold but that collective action collapses if the location of the threshold is uncertain. Theory suggests that...

Many policies addressing global climate change revolve around the implementation of mitigation and adaptation strategies. We experimentally examine subjects? choices in a climate change game where subjects are put into groups where they face a potential damage and have the choice to invest...

Can digital information and communication technology (ICT) foster mass political mobilization? We use a novel geo-referenced dataset for the entire African continent between 1998 and 2012 on the coverage of mobile phone signal together with georeferenced data from multiple sources on the...

We test whether a descriptive norm-nudge is a suitable policy tool to increase cooperation in a social dilemma when decisions are taken by teams, not individuals. 10 Each team in our experiment comes from a different fishing boat at Lake Victoria, Tanzania. The provision of a norm-nudge is...

We survey the empirical literature in economics on the impact of media technologies on social capital. Motivated by a simple model of information and collective action, we cover a range of different outcomes related to social capital, from social and political participation to interpersonal...

It has been argued that accountability is a public good that only citizens can provide. Governments can put institutions in place that allow citizens to hold public servants to account, but citizens must participate in those institutions if accountability is to be achieved. Thus, citizens face a...