This study examines why cash grants fail to increase parental investment in child education, and what can be done to increase their effectiveness. The findings assert that designing interventions as cost-sharing schemes instead of a lumpsum grant scheme significantly increases the willingness of...

This study investigates whether disaster experience and vulnerability affect individual risk-taking and time-discounting behaviour using field experiments from Ethiopia. The study finds that experiencing drought raises risk aversion and motive for precautionary saving among vulnerable...

This paper investigates the preference of parents for inter-child allocation of education investment in Ethiopia. It mainly focuses on the roles played by non-price factors of investment in child education. The study uses unique survey and experimental dataset disaggregated by individual...

Microfinance has been heralded as an effective way to address imperfections in credit markets. From a theoretical perspective, however, the success of microfinance contracts has puzzling elements. In particular, the group-based mechanisms often employed are vulnerable to free-riding and...

Despite the prevalence of agriculture as the main occupation in rural Nepal, evidence suggests that households strive to diversify their sources of income. This paper investigates why this is the case. Using household data from the World Bank and information on rainfall for the various regions...

There has been a revival of interest in the effect of risk on economic growth. We quantify both ex ante and ex post effects of risk using a stochastic version of the Ramsey model. We develop a simulation-based econometric methodology which allows us to estimate the model in the structural form...

Social capital happens to be one of the most important assets that poor possess. It is this safety net on which they fall upon at time of crisis and also draw security to reduce their vulnerabilities to several risks but what strength lies behind this social capital? Why poor invest so much in...

This paper surveys the existing literature on the determinants of household savings and credit in developing countries and examines the ways in which macro-level policies might impact on household financial behaviour

Margaret Sanger established the first birth control clinic in New York in 1916. From the mid-1920s, "Sanger clinics" spread over the entire U.S. Combining newly digitized data on the roll-out of these clinics, full-count Census data, and administrative vital statistics, we find that birth...

Margaret Sanger established the first birth control clinic in New York in 1916. From the mid-1920s, "Sanger clinics" spread over the entire U.S. Combining newly digitized data on the roll-out of these clinics, full-count Census data, and administrative vital statistics, we find that birth...