Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across countries. This paper explores the honesty among citizens across sixteen countries with...

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...

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....

The study of collective action requires an understanding of the individual incentives and of the institutional constraints that guide people in making choices about cooperating or defecting on the group facing the dilemma. The use of local ecosystems by groups of individuals is just one example...

Many forest ecosystems provide multiple goods and services to both local users (e.g. firewood, water) and to other external beneficiaries (biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration). This calls for alternative approaches in the governance of these local ecosystems. Even if local users...

A large, but inconclusive, literature addresses how economic heterogeneity affects the use of local resources and local environmental quality. One line of thought, which derives from Nash equilibrium provision of public goods, suggests that in contexts in which individual actions degrade local...

Along with the traditional primitives of economic development (material preferences, technology, and endowments), there is a growing interest in exploring how psychological and sociological factores (e.g., bounded rationality, norms, or social preferences) also influence economic decisions, the...

Explanations of poverty, growth and development more generally 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...

This paper discusses why running experiments in the field, outside of the university lab, can help us enrich the analysis we do of experimental data. One of the main arguments of the paper is that people participating in experiments, including students, do not come naked to the lab. They bring a...