Entrepreneurship is usually indentified as an important determinant of aggregate productivity and long-term growth. The determinants of entrepreneurship, nevertheless, are not entirely understood. A recent literature has linked entrepreneurship to the development of the justice system. This...

Entrepreneurship is usually identified as an important determinant of aggregate productivity and long-term growth. The determinants of entrepreneurship, nevertheless, are not entirely understood. A recent literature has linked entrepreneurship to the development of the justice system. This paper...

Poverty involves both low income levels and high income uncertainty. Do both these dimensions of being poor capture attention in ways that distort decision-making and trap people in poverty? We examine these issues using real-life shocks faced by farmers in Brazil: random payday variation...

Conditional cash transfers boosted a major reduction in poverty and a significant decrease in inequality in developing countries over the past decade. However, their success in promoting economic development is challenged by the claim that they deal with short-term poverty relief without...

Conditional cash transfers boosted a major reduction in poverty and a significant decrease in inequality in developing countries over the past decade. However, their success in promoting economic development is challenged by the claim that they deal with short-term poverty relief without...

Do poor parents respond inefficiently to future returns on investments, even when they would have the financial means to invest optimally? Combining multiple experiments, we document that when parents of high-school students in Brazil are offered the opportunity to invest in an educational...

Informational interventions have been shown to significantly change behavior across a variety of settings. Is that because they lead subjects to merely update beliefs in the right direction? Or, alternatively, is it to a large extent because they increase the salience of the decision they...

Background: School closures due to COVID-19 have left 1.6 billion students around the world without in-person classes for a prolonged period of time. To date, no study has documented whether reopening schools in developing countries during the pandemic causally increased aggregate COVID-19...