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...

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....

This paper reconsiders evidence from experimental common pool resource games from the perspective of a model of payoff sampling. Despite being parameter-free, the model is able to replicate some striking features of the data, including single-peaked frequency distributions, the persistent use of...