Microfinance has been heralded as an effective way to address imperfections in credit markets. From a theoretical perspective, however, the success of microfinance contracts has puzzling elements. In particular, the group-based mechanisms often employed are vulnerable to free-riding and collusion, although they can also reduce moral hazard and improve selection. We created an experimental econo...

Nearly a quarter of all children under the age of two in China are left behind in the countryside as parents migrate to urban areas for work. We use a longitudinal survey following young children and their caregivers from 6 to 30 months of age to estimate the e↵ects of maternal migration on development, health, and nutritional outcomes in the critical first stages of life.We find significant ne...

Does Promoting School Attendance Reduce Child Labour? Evidence from Burkina Faso’s BRIGHT Project Using data from BRIGHT, an integrated program that aims to improve school participation in rural communities in Burkina Faso, we investigate the impact of school subsidies and increased access to education on child work. Regression discontinuity estimates demonstrate that, while BRIGHT substantiall...

In this paper we examine gender differences in the inter-generational persistence of child labor within the context of intra-household resource allocation. We begin by building an intra-household allocation model where fathers and mothers may affect the education investment and the child labor participation of their sons and daughters differently due to differences in the children's human capit...

Is investment cash-flow sensitivity affected by a country’s capital market imperfection? We take 42 countries as our sample and collect six imperfect capital market measures (ICAM), ie., the stock market capitalization ratio, number of publicly-listed firm, stock turnover ratio, bank loan ratio, long-term debt ratio and the interest spread. Using a two-step approach, negative relationships betw...

Spatial Decentralization and Program Evaluation: Theory and an Example from Indonesia This paper proposes a novel instrumental variable method for program evaluation that only requires a single cross-section of data on the spatial intensity of programs and outcomes. The instruments are derived from a simple theoretical model of government decision-making in which governments are responsive to t...

Viet Nam’s ethnic minorities tend to be concentrated in remote areas and have lower living standards than the ethnic majority. How much is this due to poor economic characteristics versus low returns to characteristics? Is there a self-reinforcing culture of poverty in the minority group? We find that differences in returns to productive characteristics are an important explanation for ethnic i...

As population aging becomes more pronounced in the developing world, the uneven implementation of social safety nets raises important questions as to howwell traditional family-basedmechanisms insure elderly incomes when pension systems fail. Using a unique dataset from a recent household survey conducted in urban China, we find evidence that private transfers respond to low household income of...

This paper investigates the consequences of imperfect and uneven factor market development for farm efficiency in rural China during transition. In particular, we estimate the extent to which an inverse relationship in farm productivity can be attributed to the administrative (instead of market) allocation of land, and the extent of unevenly developed non-agricultural opportunities. Using a rec...

This survey reviews the relationship between regulation and distribution, focusing on regulatory reform in developing countries. The characteristics of these countries impose constraints on appropriate regulatory policies. These constraints condition i) the terms of the tradeoff between firms’ rents and efficiency, including the commitment problem in the presence of sunk investments, and ii) th...