Farmers in developing countries often lack access to timely and reliable information about modern technologies that are essential to improve agricultural productivity. The recent diffusion of mobile phones has the potential to overcome these barriers by making information available to those...

Corrupt practices in the assignment of government contracts are largely diffused and can generate misallocation of resources across firms. We study how disclosure of such practices affects firm growth and labor reallocation. We exploit exogenous variation in the exposure of illegally favored...

Several scholars argue that high agricultural productivity growth can retard industrial development as it draws resources towards the comparative advantage sector, agriculture. However, agricultural productivity growth can increase savings and the supply of capital, generating an expansion of...

Does fiscal consolidation lead to social unrest? Using cross-country evidence for the period 1919 to 2008, we examine the extent to which societies become unstable after budget cuts. We find a positive correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability. Expenditure cuts are particularly...