Derived from livelihoods surveys and ethnographic material about people living on the chars, or river islands, in deltaic lower Bengal, this paper illustrates the complex, diverse and ingenious ways that the poor manage money. These islands constitute some of the most vulnerable locations...

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of fiscal policy by studying, using household-level data, how households respond to shifts in government spending. Our identification strategy allows us to control for time-specific aggregate effects, such as the stance of monetary policy or the...

A central task in microeconomics is to predict choices in as-yet-unobserved situations (e.g., after some policy intervention). Standard approaches can prove problematic when sufficiently similar changes have not been observed or do not have observable exogenous causes. We explore an alternative...

With a large nationwide retailer, we run a natural field experiment to measure the effects of energy use information disclosure, customer rebates, and sales agent incentives on demand for energy efficient durable goods. While a combination of large rebates plus sales incentives substantially...

China has experienced remarkably stable growth and inflation in recent years according to official statistics. We construct alternative estimates using detailed information on Chinese household-purchasing patterns. As households become richer, a smaller fraction of total expenditures are spent...

Using shopping diary survey data we show that changing payment patterns is a challenging task; even when consumers have fallen in love with the debit card, they find it hard to divorce from cash. While seven out of ten Dutch consumers report to prefer using the debit card, only seven out of...

We analyzed the performance of marginalized subsistence microenterprises, through dichotomous logistic regressions by maximum likelihood. We tested 52,224 hypotheses, trying to find behavior patterns on microenterprises. The results show that performance is the result of a combination of factors...

The purpose of this paper was to find out if Costco’s treasure hunt strategy was effectively attracting customers and increasing spending per visit. It was an exploratory research to provide insights in the perceptions of Costco customers in reference to new, seasonal, and premium...

This paper examines student selection of mobile phone services. The research used a quantitative methodology. The author surveyed some 500 University and Polytechnic students in Ghana and finds that the basic reason for changing phone servers is reliability and cost savings. The author also...

The implementation of Gary Beckers (1965) time allocation model is ham-pered by the fact that values of the di¤erent time uses are usually not observed.In practice, one often assumes that the value of time is uniform across time usesby using market wages. This approach implies a fundamental...