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For further information about this series and for press inquiries please contact Lubala Chibwe, by email: l.chibwe@lse.ac.uk.
Alex Armand, Britta Augsburg, Antonella Bancalari and Maitreesh Ghatak
This study explores the interaction between the quality of public services, the implementation of user fees, and the resulting potential for exclusion, that can lead to negative externalities. Our theoretical framework t...Read more...
15 November 2023
Linchuan Xu
Should the government set up a separate ministry for all environmental issues, or ask all the existing decentralized and regional political organizations to have an environment mandate? This paper studies how organizatio...Read more...
Virginia Minni
Why do managers matter for firm performance? This paper provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records from a large multinational fi...Read more...
30 October 2023
Céline Zipfel
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) accounts for around 40% of projected global births over the next 80 years. To investigate the roots of persistently high fertility rates across the region, I assemble micro data from 192 Demogr...Read more...
1 December 2022
Torsten Figueiredo Walter
This paper examines how the allocation of teachers across public primary schools differs between countries and the extent to which this can explain differences in educational outcomes. First, I build a new global school-...Read more...
15 June 2020
Oriana Bandiera, Robin Burgess, Erika Deserranno, Ricardo Morel, Imran Rasul and Munshi Sulaiman
This paper studies how the social structure of village economies affects policy implementation by local agents. We randomly select one of two viable candidates to deliver an agricultural extension program in rural Uganda...Read more...
29 May 2020
Laura Metzger, Adnan Qadir Khan and Teddy Svoronos
In a lab-in-field experiment with elite civil servants in Pakistan, we investigate whether groups outperform individuals in a two-staged task which requires effective use of data and evidence. We also study how efficient...Read more...
24 April 2020
Clare Balboni, Oriana Bandiera, Robin Burgess, Maitreesh Ghatak and Anton Heil
There are two views as to why people stay poor. The equal opportunity view emphasizes that differences in individual traits like talent or motivation make the poor choose low productivity jobs. The poverty traps view e...Read more...
9 March 2020
James Berry, Greg Fischer and Raymond Guiteras
Using the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism, we estimate the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for and impact of clean water technology through a field experiment in Ghana. Although WTP is low relative to the cost, demand ...Read more...
25 May 2018
Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera and Scott Lee
We embed a field experiment in a nationwide recruitment drive for nurses in Zambia to test whether career benefits attract talent at the expense of prosocial motivation. We randomize the offer of career benefits at the r...Read more...
Revised March 2018
Livia Alfonsi, Oriana Bandiera, Vittorio Bassi, Robin Burgess, Imran Rasul, Munshi Sulaiman and Anna Vitali
We design a labour market experiment to compare demand-side and supply-side policies to tackle youth unemployment, a key issue in low-income countries. The experiment tracks 1700 workers and 1500 firms over four years to...Read more...
8 January 2018
Valentino Larcinese and Luke Miner
What are the political consequences of the diffusion of broadband internet? We address this question by studying the 2008 US presidential election, the first political campaign where the internet played a key role. Drawi...Read more...
21 September 2017
Nicola Limodio
Media can affect governments and public policy by promoting anti-government demonstrations. Under media pressure, a multitasking government might reallocate effort across tasks, rather than increase the total aggregate, ...Read more...
4 August 2016
I study the impact of World Bank managers on project success through the value-added method. Manager effects are interpretable as performance indices and are more volatile than country effects. Both correlate positively...Read more...
Verena Kroth, Valentino Larcinese and Joachim Wehner
Does democracy affect basic service delivery? If yes, who benefits, and which elements of democracy matter - enfranchisement, the liberalization of political organization, or both? In 1994, 19 million South Africans gai...Read more...
14 March 2016
Yonas Alem and Jonathan Colmer
When agents are unable to smooth consumption and have distorted beliefs about the likelihood of future income realisations, uncertainty about future states of the world has a direct effect on individual welfare. However,...Read more...
1 August 2015
Oriana Bandiera, Robin Burgess, Narayan Das, Selim Gulesci, Imran Rasul and Munshi Sulaiman
We study how women’s choices over labor activities in village economies correlate with poverty and whether enabling the poorest women to take on the activities of their richer counterparts can set them on a sustainable...Read more...
Revised March 2016
Oriana Bandiera, Myra Mohnen, Imran Rasul and Martina Viarengo
By the mid-19th century, America was the best educated nation on Earth: significant financial investments in education were being undertaken and the majority of children voluntarily attended public schools. So why did US...Read more...
Revised December 2015
Guo Xu
How does collective reputation affect hiring and selection into jobs? Using detailed hiring data from a global online labour market, where the country of residence is the salient group characteristic, we document a mecha...Read more...
18 May 2015
Anett John (née Hofmann)
Commitment products are widely regarded as a remedy for self-control problems. However, imperfect knowledge about one's preferences implies that individuals may fail to anticipate their behaviour under commitment, and co...Read more...
Revised October 2015
Thiemo Fetzer
Governments in conflict torn states scramble for effective policies to persistently reduce levels of violence. This paper provides evidence that a workfare program that functions as a social insurance, providing employme...Read more...
19 June 2014
Jonathan de Quidt
Empirically, labor contracts that financially penalize failure induce higher effort provision than economically identical contracts presented as paying a bonus for success, an effect attributed to loss aversion. This is ...Read more...
3 April 2014
Empirical evidence suggests that there is a high demand for informal savings mechanisms even though these often feature negative returns - such as deposit collectors, ROSCAs, microloans, and informal borrowing. This pape...Read more...
2 April 2014
Oriana Bandiera, Niklas Buehren, Robin Burgess, Markus Goldstein, Selim Gulesci, Imran Rasul and Munshi Sulaiman
Women in developing countries are disempowered relative to their contemporaries in developed countries. High youth unemployment and early marriage and childbearing interact to limit human capital investment and enforce d...Read more...
Revised June 2015
Oriana Bandiera, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun
CEOs affect the performance of the firms they manage, and family CEOs seem to weaken it. Yet little is known about what top executives actually do, and whether it differs by firm ownership. We study CEOs in the Indian ma...Read more...
Revised December 2014
Rafael Hortala-Vallve, Valentino Larcinese and Stephanie Rickard
Institutions can limit governments' policy options. Such restrictions are usually commended as solutions to time inconsistency problems or coordination failures. However, policy constraints can have important drawbacks a...Read more...
3 December 2013
Timothy Besley and Maitreesh Ghatak
When social benefits cannot be measured, a hybrid organization which selects managers based on motivation can be used to balance profi…ts with a social purpose. This paper develops a model of social enterprise based on s...Read more...
8 November 2013
Organizations often use awards to incentivize performance. We design a field experiment to unbundle the mechanisms through which awards may affect behavior: by facilitating social comparison and by conferring recognition...Read more...
14 August 2013
Robin Burgess, Remi Jedwab, Edward Miguel, Ameet Morjaria and Gerard Padro i Miquel
Ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development. This paper provides credible quantifi…cation of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in Kenyan districts across the 1963-2011 period. Guide...Read more...
8 August 2013
Thiemo Fetzer, Maitreesh Ghatak and Jonathan de Quidt
This paper contrasts individual liability lending with and without groups to joint liability lending. By doing so, we shed light on an apparent shift away from joint liability lending towards individual liability lending...Read more...
16 July 2013
A new version of this paper has been published on August 2015 (Paper No EOPP 58). The world’s poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale and long-ter...Read more...
Revised August 2015
Erlend Berg, Maitreesh Ghatak, R Manjula, D Rajasekhar and Sanchari Roy
This paper studies the interaction of incentive pay and social distance in the dissemination of information. We analyse theoretically as well as empirically the effect of incentive pay when agents have pro-social objecti...Read more...
1 March 2013
Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson
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1 January 2013
Jonathan de Quidt, Thiemo Fetzer and Maitreesh Ghatak
Motivated by recent controversies surrounding the role of commercial lenders in microfinance, we analyze borrower welfare under different market structures,considering a benevolent non-profit lender, a for-profit monopol...Read more...
1 September 2012
Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay and Elliott Green
The importance of pre-colonial history on contemporary African development has become an important .eld of study within development economics in recent years. In particular Gennaioli and Rainer (2007) suggest that pre-co...Read more...
1 August 2012
Anila Channa and Jean-Paul Faguet
We review empirical evidence on the ability of decentralization to enhance preference matching and technical efficiency in the provision of health and education in developing countries. Many influential surveys have foun...Read more...
1 July 2012
Robin Burgess, Matthew Hansen, Benjamin Olken, Peter Potapov and Stefanie Sieber
Tropical deforestation accounts for almost one-…fifth of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and threatens the world’s most diverse ecosystems. The prevalence of illegal forest extraction in the tropics suggests that unde...Read more...
1 April 2012
Timothy Besley and Marta Reynal-Querol
There is a great deal of interest in the causes and consequences of conflict in Africa, one of the poorest areas of the world where only modest economic progress has been made. This paper asks whether post-colonial confl...Read more...
1 February 2012
Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera and Kelsey Jack
A substantial body of research investigates the design of incentives in firms, yet less is known about incentives in organizations that hire individuals to perform tasks with positive social spillovers. We conduct a fiel...Read more...
Revised February 2014
John Morrow and Michael Carter
The political left turn in Latin America, which lagged its transition to liberalized market economies by a decade or more, challenges conventional economic explanations of voting behavior. While the implications of upwar...Read more...
1 January 2012
Oriana Bandiera, Iwan Baranky and Imran Rasul
Many organizations rely on teamwork, and yet field evidence on the impacts of team-based incentives remains scarce. Compared to individual incentives, team incentives can affect productivity by changing both workers’ eff...Read more...
1 December 2011
Valentino Larcinese
This paper presents evidence on the consequences of the 1912 introduction of 'quasiuniversal' male suffrage in Italy. The reform increased the electorate from slightly less than three million to 8,650,000 and left the el...Read more...
Timothy Besley, Jessica Leight, Rohini Pande and Vijayendra Rao
While the regulation of tenancy arrangements is widespread in the developing world, evidence on how such regulation influences the long-run allocation of land and labor remains limited. To provide such evidence, this pap...Read more...
1 November 2011
We explore the consequence for taxation and regulation of bonus pay when investors are protected by taxpayers from downside risk. The paper develops a model where workers in financial sector firms make decisions about ef...Read more...
1 July 2011
Madhav S, Aney, Maitreesh Ghatak and Massimo Morelli
We study how inefficiencies of market failure may be further amplified by political choices made by interest groups created in the inefficient market. We take an occupational choice framework, where agents are endowed he...Read more...
We discuss how the use of field experiments sheds light on long standing research questions relating to firm behavior. We present insights from two classes of experiments: within and across firms, and draw common lessons...Read more...
Jean-Paul Faguet
The most important theoretical argument concerning decentralization is that it can improve governance by making government more accountable and responsive to the governed. Improving governance is also central to the moti...Read more...
1 June 2011
Nation-building has long been seen as an important focus for postcolonial African governments. However, up until now there has been no empirical analysis of either the origins or consequences of these policies. Here we c...Read more...
June 2011
D Rajasekhar, Erlend Berg, Maitreesh Ghatak, R Manjula and Sanchari Roy
The National Health Insurance Scheme (Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, RSBY) aims to improve poor people’s access to quality health care in India. This paper looks at the implementation of the scheme in Karnataka, drawing...Read more...
March 2011
Maitreesh Ghatak and Alexander Karaivanov
We analyze optimal contracts and optimal matching patterns in a simple model of partnership where there is a double-sided moral hazard problem and potential partners differ in their productivity in two tasks. It is possi...Read more...
February 2011
Greg Fischer
Few microfinance-funded businesses grow beyond subsistence entrepreneurship. This paper considers one possible explanation: that the structure of existing microfinance contracts may discourage risky but high-expected ret...Read more...
It is widely recognized that fragile states are key symptoms of under-development in many parts of the world. Such states are incapable of delivering basic services to their citizens and political violence is commonplace...Read more...
January 2011
Greg Fischer and Maitreesh Ghatak
This paper analyzes the theoretical underpinnings of high-frequency repayment, a feature in nearly all microfinance contracts that has been largely overlooked by theorists. The pervasive belief among practitioners that f...Read more...
July 2010
Roberto Bonfatti and Maitreesh Ghatak
An interesting puzzle is that trade liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s has been associated with a sharp increase in the skill premium in both developed and developing countries. This is in contrast with neoclassical t...Read more...
November 2010
Munshi Sulaiman
Food assistance is one of the most common forms of safety net programs in postconflict situations. Besides the humanitarian and promotional roles, there are widespread scepticisms of food assistance regarding its possibl...Read more...
December 2010
Oriana Bandiera and Gilat Levy
This paper analyzes whether political outcomes in local democracies are determined by the preferences of the median - typically poor - agents or whether they reflect the wishes of the wealthy elites. A model shows that w...Read more...
August 2010
Davide Dragone and Luca Savorelli
The increasing concern of the policy maker about eating behavior has focused on the spread of obesity and on the evidence of a consistent number of individuals dieting despite being underweight. As the latter behavior is...Read more...
June 2010
Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson (2002) have claimed that the world income distribution underwent a 'Reversal of Fortune' from 1500 to the present, whereby formerly rich countries in what is now the developing world became ...Read more...
April 2010
Oriana Bandiera, Robin Burgess, Selim Gulesci and Imran Rasul
Whether basic entrepreneurship can be inculcated amongst the poorest in society and serve as a route out of poverty remains an open question. We provide evidence on this issue by looking at the effects of a large-scale a...Read more...
December 2009
Maitreesh Ghatak and Hannes Mueller
We re-examine the labor donation theory of not-for-profits and show that these organizations may exist not necessarily because motivated workers prefer to work in them, or that they dominate for-profits in terms of welfa...Read more...
November 2009
Gabriel Leon
Why do elected officials often suffer from political paralysis and fail to implement the best policies available? This paper considers a new yet intuitive explanation that focuses on the quality of the politicians compet...Read more...
August 2009
One of the most striking institutional features of many less developed countries is that their militaries are closely involved in policy-making, potentially having a large impact on economic outcomes. This paper examines...Read more...
July 2009
Timothy Besley and Hannes Mueller
This paper exploits data on the pattern of violence across regions and over time to estimate the impact of the peace process in Northern Ireland on house prices. We begin with a linear model that estimates the average tr...Read more...
May 2009
We report on an on-going project, which asks a number of questions relevant to the study of state capacity. What are the main economic and political determinants of the state’s capacity to raise revenue and support priva...Read more...
June 2009
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Maitreesh Ghatak and Jeanne Lafortune
This paper studies the role played by caste, education and other social and economic attributes in arranged marriages among middle-class Indians. We use a unique data set on individuals who placed matrimonial advertiseme...Read more...
This paper explores the consequences of creating and improving property rights so that fixed assets can be used as collateral. This has become a cause célèbre of Hernando de Soto whose views are influential in debates ab...Read more...
April 2009
Valentino Larcinese, Leonzio Rizzo and Cecilia Testa
We analyze the relationship between senate malapportionment and the allocation of the US federal budget to the states during the period 1978-2002. A substantial literature originating from the influential paper by ?) fin...Read more...
This chapter develops a unified analytical framework, drawing on and extending the existing literature on the subject, for studying the role of property rights in economic development. It addresses two fundamental and re...Read more...
February 2009
This paper studies the incidence of civil war over time. We put forward a canonical model of civil war, which relates the incidence of conflict to circumstances, institutions and features of the underlying economy and po...Read more...
Fernando Aragon
This paper argues that there is nothing anomalous about the flypaper effect. I develop a simple median voter model of government spending with costly tax collection that predicts the flypaper effect and provide a quantif...Read more...
January 2009
This paper explores empirically the role of nomination procedures on political selection and the determinants for adopting contestable selection methods such as primaries. Using data from Latin American parties, I find e...Read more...
Jordi Blanes i Vidal and Clare Leaver
Tenured public officials such as judges are often thought to be indifferent to the concerns of the electorate and, as a result, potentially lacking in discipline but unlikely to pander to public opinion. We investigate t...Read more...
September 2008
Roberto Bonfatti
European colonialism had two key economic aspects: the extraction of colonial wealth by colonizers, and the relevance of trade for colonial economies. I build a simple model of colonialism which puts these two elements a...Read more...