This paper uses experimental methods to study the impact of limited enforcement and reputation on employer-worker relations in labour markets in Ghana. Participants, students recruited from universities in Accra, Ghana are designated as either employers or workers and play a gift-exchange game...

We run an artefactual field experiment in rural India which tests whether farmers can create efficient networks in a repeated link formation game, and whether group categorization results in homophily and loss of network efficiency. We find that the efficiency of the networks formed in the...

Thanks to anti-retroviral therapies, people living with HIV in developing countries can now have a near-normal life at a cost of a few hundred dollars per year. We postulate that given this newly low cost of maintaining lives, there is a moral duty to rescue those who are infected. The core of...

This paper looks at the link between housing conditions and household income and labour market participation in South Africa. I use four waves of panel data from 2002-2009 on households that were originally living in informal dwellings. I find that those households that received free government...

Do high costs of search affect the labour market outcomes of young job seekers living far away from the centre of cities? I randomly assign temporary and non-fungible transport subsidies to unemployed youth living in spatially dislocated areas of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Lowering transport costs...

We present a theoretical model of moral hazard and adverse selection in an imperfectly competitive loans market that is suitable for application to Africa. The model allows for variation in both the level of contract enforcement (depending on the quality of governance) and the degree of market...

The literature has shown that network architecture depends crucially on whether links are formed unilaterally or bilaterally, that is, on whether the consent of both nodes is required for a link to be formed. We propose a text whether network data is best seen as an actual link or willingness to...

We investigate whether the set of available enforcement mechanisms affects the formation of risk sharing relations by applying dyadic regression analysis to data from a specifically designed behavioural experiment, two surveys and a genealogical mapping exercise. During the experiment...

Many developing countries periodically face large adverse shocks to their economies. We study two distinct types of such shocks - large declines in the price of a country’s commodity exports and severe natural disasters - , both of which have occurred frequently in the recent past....

Drawing on a new and comprehensive measure of logistics quality, our gravity model suggests logistics in the exporting and partner-country can have an important impact on bilateral exports. A one standard deviation improvement in the exporter’s logistics quality, which for example would...