This paper investigates the trade-offs between local elites and state agents as tax collectors in low-capacity states. We study a randomized policy experiment assigning neighborhoods of large Congolese city to property collection by chiefs or agents. Chief raised compliance 3.2 percentage points, increasing revenue 44 percent. Chiefs collected more bribes but did not undermine morale trust gove...

This study argues that economic vulnerability causes citizens to participate in clientelism, a phenomenon with various pernicious consequences. To examine how reduced affects citizens’ participation we employ two exogenous shocks vulnerability. First, designed randomized control trial reduce household vulnerability: our development intervention constructed residential water cisterns drought-pro...

We study the spending profile of workers who experience both a positive transitory income shock (lump-sum severance pay) and negative permanent (layoff). Using de-identified expenditure employment data from Brazil, we show that increase at layoff by 35 percent despite experiencing 14 long-term loss. find high sensitivity to cash-on-hand across consumption categories for several sources variatio...

If gifts are reciprocated in the future, intra-household distribution of resources will depend on premarital gifts such as dowry, bride-price and parents’ gifts to a child such as schooling and nurturing. If such social norms of reciprocity exist, parental income effects on their child’s human capital will be asymmetric, and the effect will depend on the amount of intra-household transfers made...

We present a theory of interpersonal economic changes based on three simplest elements: Positive Sum Games, Zero-Sum and Games «with subtraction». This proposal integrates Menger’s Mises’s theories; it includes also the distinction made by Böhm-Bawerk between goods promises. On such ground we comprehensive explanation for boom-burst cycle processes, distinguishing where is damaging character re...

This study examines whether the factors that determine the welfare participation of women who experienced teenage motherhood differ from the factors that determine the welfare participation of women who had their first child at an older age. We examine these factors across the lifetimes of both groups of women. A dynamic random effects probit model is applied to investigate the extent of state ...

THE CONNEXION BETWEEN OLD AND NEW APPROACHES TO FINANCIAL SATISFACTION by Bernard M.S.van Praag In this paper we compare the new satisfaction evaluation approach, developed in the nineties by Oswald ,Clark , Blanchflower and others with the older income evaluation (IEQ) approach, developed by Van Praag and Kapteyn in the seventies of the previous century. We find that both approaches yield stri...

Economic growth in pre-industrial Europe was driven by the expansion of the market. The ‘market’ was a complex commercial structure made up of merchant firms, merchant associations, and organized markets. This paper provides an overview of the pre-industrial commercial structure, of how it functioned, and of how it evolved. JEL Categories: N13, D23, L14, L81, O12 *This paper is a draft chapter ...

Using controlled experiments to compare the risk attitude and willingness to compete of husbands and wives in 500 couples in rural Vietnam, we find that women are more risk averse than men and that, compared to men, women are less likely to choose to compete, irrespectively of how likely they are to succeed. Our findings suggest that women are more likely to self-select into economic activities...

We present a new approach for the empirical investigation of agglomeration patterns. We examine the clustering of manufacturing firms by identifying patterns of spatial network formation that deviate from randomly generated networks. Using firm-level panel data from Vietnam we calculate transitivity, a measure to determine the strength of clustering of manufacturing firms. We then test whether ...