Portfolio allocation decisions increasingly incorporate social values. The most common of these strategies are misguided. We develop a tractable framework in which commercial and social investors compete, and identify alternative strategies for social investors that result in higher social...

We document the impact of India’s COVID-19 lockdown on the food supply chain. Food arrivals in wholesale markets dropped by 69% in the three weeks following the lockdown and wholesale prices rose by 8%. Six weeks after the lockdown began, volumes and prices had fully recovered. The initial...

In recent years, impact investors – private investors who seek to generate simultaneously attractive financial and social returns – have attracted intense interest and controversy. We analyze a novel, comprehensive data set of impact and traditional investors to assess how the non-financial...

What accounts for the ubiquity of small vendors operating side-by-side in the urban centers of developing countries? Why don’t competitive forces drive some vendors out of the market? We ran an experiment in Kolkata vegetable markets in which we induced (via subsidizing) some vendors to sell...

We study the impact of mobile money transfers to a representative sample of low-income Ghanaians during the COVID-19 pandemic. The announcement of the upcoming transfers affects neither consumption, well-being, nor social distancing. Once disbursed, transfers increase food expenditure by 8%,...