We analyze a model of wage payment practices in which strategic complementarities arise because each employer’s costs of delaying wages decrease with the arrears in its labor market. The model is estimated on panel data for workers and firms in Russia, facilitating identification through fixed effects for employees, employers, and local labor markets, and instrumental variables based on policy ...

Using the 2004-05 India Human Development Survey data, we estimate and decompose the earnings of household businesses owned by Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SCSTs) and non-SCSTs across the earnings distribution. We find clear differences in characteristics between the two types of businesses with the former faring significantly worse. The mean decomposition reveals that as much as 55 percent of ...

We provide empirical evidence that Rwandans use the mobile phone network to transfer airtime to those affected by unexpected shocks. Using an extensive dataset on mobile phone activity in Rwanda and exploiting the quasi-random timing and location of natural disasters, we show that individuals make transfers and calls to people affected by disasters. The magnitude of these transfers is small in ...

Entry costs vary dramatically across countries. To assess their impact we construct a model with endogenous entry and operation decisions by …rms and calibrate it to match the U.S. distribution of …rms by size. Higher entry costs lead to greater misallocation of productive factors and lower TFP and output. In the model, countries in the lowest decile of the entry costs distribution have 1.35 to...

This paper uses household data to test whether microfinance institutions created by the Malawian government in the mid-1990s under its Poverty Alleviation Programme crowded out access to informal loans. As in several recent studies, the paper adopts policy evaluation techniques to identify a causal relationship between access to government-sponsored credit programmes and informal loans. After t...

Based on first-hand account, this paper offers evidence on price setting and price adjustment mechanisms that were illegally employed under the Soviet planning and rationing regime. The evidence is anecdotal, and is based on personal experience during the years 1960–1971 in the Republic of Georgia. The description of the social organization of the black markets and other illegal economic activi...

This paper establishes a relationship between the observability of common shocks and optimal organizational design under a multiagent moral hazard environment. The choices of organization and investment on information about common shocks are determined jointly, in a Walrasian equilibrium model where the commodities traded are memberships in organizations. Numerical results reveal that both coop...

A process of endogenous human capital formation is analyzed in combination with the existence of trade unions and banks. By lowering opportunity costs for schooling, trade unions provide incentive for human capital investments for parts of the workforce. Imperfect competition in the banking sector creates a self-selection situation favorable for long-term investment giving firms the possibility...

Households in developing countries use a variety of informal mechanisms to cope with risk, including mutual support and risk-sharing. These mechanisms cannot avoid that they remain vulnerable to shocks. Public programs in the form of food aid distribution and food-for-work programs are meant to protect vulnerable households from consumption and nutrition downturns by providing a safety net. In ...

Using a simple two-firm, two-period model, we analyze for a developing economy the process of ‘entrepreneurial entry,’ that is, entry by new firms into an industry that did not previously exist in that country, focusing on the choice between formal and informal status. Thus we explore issues such as how informality may enable an entrepreneur to test the profitability of an industry without incu...