This paper provides the first real-world evidence of Giffen behavior, i.e., upward sloping demand. Subsidizing the prices of dietary staples for extremely poor households in two provinces of China, we find strong evidence of Giffen behavior for rice in Hunan, and weaker evidence for wheat in Gansu. The data provide new insight into the consumption behavior of the poor, who act as though maximiz...

In recent years, the international community has expanded efforts in programme evaluation to improve the accountability of development projects. This paper presents approaches to implementing state-of-the-art evaluations in rural electrification projects, taking into account specific challenges that researchers face in such interventions. Furthermore, it suggests a particular approach to assess...

The analysis of land investment and tenure security usually assumes land scarcity. However, some developing countries have communities with land abundance. This article therefore examines the effects of land abundance for investment and tenure security. The paper develops a formal test of land abundance and estimates a system of three simultaneous equations. The empirical analysis uncovers sign...

This paper consists of an introductory survey of two fundamental questions regarding the link between entrepreneurship and economic growth. The first one deals with the endogenous relationship between entrepreneurship and growth. In particular, we suggest that, while more entrepreneurship could mean more economic growth, economic growth in turn could affect the individual arbitrage between diff...

The impact of endogeneity and measurement error on the estimated effect of household economic resources on child height is demonstrated. These econometric problems contribute to uncertainty in the literature about the significance of income effects on child health and nutrition. Results are based on a household survey from Papua New Guinea, where repeated within-year observations on households ...

Does Forced Solidarity Hamper Investment in Small and Micro Enterprises? Sharing is a norm in many societies. We present a theoretical model on the trade-off between sharing and investment which we test on data from tailors in Burkina Faso. The empirical results support the idea that there are two behavioural patterns: entrepreneurs following an ‘insurance regime’ comply with sharing norms, are...

This paper uses a field experiment to test whether intrahousehold heterogeneity in discount factors leads to inefficient strategic savings behavior. I gave married couples in rural Kenya the opportunity to open both joint and individual bank accounts at randomly assigned interest rates. I also directly elicited discount factors for all individuals in the experiment. Couples who are well matched...

Mongolia’s mass privatization program was implanted in a country that lacked the very basic institutions of capitalism. This paper examines the effects of competition and ownership on the efficiency of the newly privatized enterprises, using a representative sample of enterprises and controlling for possible selection biases. Competition has quantitatively large effects; perfectly competitive f...

Millions of ultra-poor households in sub-Saharan Africa rely exclusively on savings groups to meet their financial needs. However, the ability of savings groups to fully meet these needs remains unclear. We randomly assign ultra-poor Ugandan households to savings groups containing different proportions of ultra-poor members. We find evidence that groups may be unable to satisfy the borrowing ne...

War and Stature: Growing Up During the Nigerian Civil War The Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 was precipitated by secession of the Igbo-dominated southeastern region to create the state of Biafra. It was the first civil war in Africa, the predecessor of many. We investigate the legacies of this war four decades later. Using variation across ethnicity and cohort, we identify significant long run i...