This paper o¤ers a bridge between the theoretical literature on endogenous network formation and the empirical work on the impact of social networks on economic performance. We provide a theoretical framework of endogenous network formation that yields testable predictions for the network architectures generated by a particular informal institution common in village economies. We test the impli...

Elder Parent Health and the Migration Decision of Adult Children: Evidence from Rural China Recent research has shown that participation in migrant labor markets has led to substantial increases in income for families in rural China. This paper asks how participation is affected by elder parent health. We find that younger adults are less likely to work as migrants when a parent is ill. Poor el...

Over the course of 15 years, between 1992 and 2007, Mexico carried out a major land titling program that handed out certificates over usage rights for more than 90% of its communally held land (ejidos). Importantly, formally specifying usage rights through certification can reduce ambiguity in claims to property. This paper analyzes the long run impact of this program using data from 1991 and 2...

In this paper we analyse the relative importance of individual ability and labour market institutions, including public sector wage setting and trade unions, in determining earnings differences across different types of employment. To do this we use the KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study data from South Africa, which show extremely large average earnings differentials across different types of...

This paper analyses whether agricultural information flows give rise to social learning effects in banana cultivation in Nyakatoke, a small Tanzanian village. Based on a village census, full information is available on socio-economic characteristics and banana production of farmer kinship members, neighbours and informal insurance group members. This allows a test for social learning within the...

Persistently high youth unemployment is one of the most pressing problems in South Africa. The South African government has proposed an employer wage subsidy to address the issue. We prospectively analyze such a policy. Recognizing that a credible estimate of the policy’s impact requires a model of the labor market that itself generates high unemployment in equilibrium, we estimate a structural...

This paper investigates the dynamic impacts of cotton marketing reforms on farm output in rural Zambia. Following liberalization and the elimination of the Zambian cotton marketing board, the sector developed an outgrower scheme whereby cotton firms provided credit, access to inputs and output markets, and technical assistance to the farmers. There are two distinctive phases of the reforms: a f...

Understanding Pareto Inefficient Intrahousehold Allocations Udry (1996) uses household survey data and finds that the allocation of resources within households is Pareto inefficient, contradicting the main assumption of most collective models of intrahousehold bargaining. He finds that among plots planted with the same crop in the same year, within a given household, those controlled by women p...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the impacts of medium and long term participation in microfinance programs. It utilises a new, large and unique panel dataset collected from treatment and control households from 1997 to 2005. The data enables us to identify continuing participants in the program as well as newcomers and leavers. We employ different estimation strategies including trip...

We show that the effect of eviction threats on unobservable investment effort can be positive. We demonstrate this apparently counter-intuitive result in a model of tenancy where investment by a tenant in the current period raises the chances of doing well in the next period, and therefore retaining the job in the period after next period. If the tenant earns rents, the landlord can partly subs...