This paper describes the results of initial work analysing a panel of rural households in Peru between 1994 and 2004 to determine household responses to changes in relative prices of traditional versus export-oriented products. Our principal interest was to better understand how household...

Property rights are seen as a prerequisite for economic development and poverty reduction essentially because improvements in land rights are assumed to reduce the risk expropriation, increase the possibilities of trade of land, and reduce credit rationing. If property rights are not clear there...

Over the past decade, the Peruvian government has issued property titles to over 1.2 million urban households, the largest government titling program targeted to urban squatters in the developing world. This paper examines the labor market effects of increases in tenure security resulting from...

In stark contrast to bank debt contracts, most micro-finance contracts require that repayments start nearly immediately after loan disbursement and occur weekly thereafter. Even though economic theory suggests that a more flexible repayment schedule would benefit clients and potentially improve...

We posit that household decision-making over fertility is characterized by moral hazard since most contraception can only be perfectly observed by the woman. Using an experiment in Zambia that varied whether women were given access to contraceptives alone or with their husbands, we find that...

Microfinance clients were randomly assigned to repayment groups that met either weekly or monthly during their first loan cycle, and then graduated to identical meeting frequency for their second loan. Long-run survey data and a follow-up public goods experiment reveal that clients initially...

Cognitive damage from iodine deficiency disorders (IDD) has important implications for economic growth through its effect on human capital. To gauge the magnitude of this influence, we evaluate the impact on schooling of reductions in IDD from intensive iodine supplementation in Tanzania. Our...