A common premise in both the theoretical and policy literatures on development is that people remain poor because they are too impatient to save and too risk averse to take the sort of chances needed to accumulate wealth. The empirical literature, however, suggests that this assumption is far...

We design a real-time, intercultural common pool resource experiment using participants from cultures that derive different benefits from a global public good (extraction vs. conservation of biodiversity resources) to analyze the effect of group affiliation on cooperative behavior. We also...

Differences in group affiliation may affect the level of cooperation in global commons situations such as programs for the conservation of resources which generate benefits that transcend state boundaries. We design a real-time, cross-cultural common pool resource (CPR) experiment purposely...

Explanations of poverty, growth and development depend on the assumptions made about individual preferences and the willingness to engage in strategic behaviour. Economic experiments, especially those conducted in the field, have begun to paint a picture of economic agents in developing...

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) has been adopted in Mali to scale-up sanitation in rural areas and accelerate progress towards the MDG target on sustainable access to basic sanitation. However, few impact evaluations of community-based sanitation interventions have been conducted so far....

"In particular, the academic debate over the best prediction about the behavior of people that use a common-pool resource (CPR), and the recommended policy approaches to the CPR dilemma have undergone a very interesting evolution throughout the last 3 decades of the pastcentury, since the...

Community mobilization is a key feature of community-based development projects. Community mobilization requires facilitating communication between village members and between leaders and the rest of the community. Is communication an effective device through which mobilization may foster...

Using data from an experiment conducted in 70 Colombian communities, we investigate who pools risk with whom when trust is crucial to enforce risk pooling arrangements. We explore the roles played by risk attitudes and social networks. Both theoretically and empirically, we find that close...