This paper provides experimental evidence on the electoral effect of a large education reform in a developing democracy. Despite significantly improving school quality, the policy reduced the incumbent party's presidential vote share by 3 percentage points (10%). This does not imply that voters...

This paper studies the welfare effects of unemployment insurance (UI) in low-income countries characterized by high levels of informality, weak enforcement of UI claims, and job search frictions. We assess the impact of UI on workers' welfare in the presence of moral hazard and liquidity...

Why does inequality vary across societies? We advance the hypothesis that in a market economy, where earning differentials reflect variations in productive traits, a significant component of the differences in income inequality across societies can be attributed to variation in societal...

Adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa have some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence across the globe. This paper evaluates the impact of a randomized controlled trial that offers females a goal setting activity to improve their sexual and reproductive health outcomes and offers their...

Institutions of justice, like prisons, can be used to serve economic and other extrajudicial interests, with lasting deleterious effects. We study the effects on incarceration when prisoners are primarily used as a source of labor using evidence from British colonial Nigeria. We digitized 65...

This research analyzes the impact of investment in Research and Development (R&D) and the number of researchers on the economic growth of some of the economies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), for the period 1996-2016. A causality analysis in the sense of...

Play in the traditional trust experiment depends both on trust beliefs and on levels of risk aversion. We ran two experiments with a diverse set of subjects in fifteen villages of rural Paraguay, the traditional trust experiment and a new experiment measuring only risk aversion. We find that...

Despite the shortcomings of Hayek's spontaneous order, there is a positive side, perhaps even a positive feedback. Hayek left us with a "what if" question and returns us to that initial opening of Pandora's Box, or perhaps the initial onset of neo-realism, neo-liberalism, developmentalism,...

Market-oriented economic policies - reflected in limited economic activity by government, protection of private property rights, a sound monetary policy, outward orientation regarding trade and efficient tax and regulatory policy - have been strongly linked to faster rates of economic growth....

A model is developed to study the implications of the presence of rent-opposing activities for the measurement of deadweight losses and for cost-benefit analysis. Our analysis provides an upper bound on the social cost of rent seekingin the presence of potential rent opposers. We also offer...