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...

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 ...

This paper examines the importance of network-based intergenerational correlations in South Africa. I use longitudinal data on young South Africans to examine the covariance of children’s employment with parents’usefulness in job search. I …nd that fathers serve as useful network connections to their sons (and not daughters), but that mothers do not seem to be useful network connections. The fa...