Low-income countries struggle to collect tax, hurting economic stability, raising debt levels, cutting growth, and gutting basic services. Abebe Shimeles of African Economic Research Consortium tells Tim Phillips about a successful experiment in Ethiopia that also demonstrates the problem of creating sustainable policies to increase tax revenues.
Big infrastructure projects are often dismissed as expensive and problematic. But Yogita Shamdasani tells Tim Phillips how a national roadbuilding program in India has transformed the lives of villagers by making agriculture more productive.
Will a government target spending in places where it thinks it can pick up support in the next election, or target funding to regions that supported it? A new paper analyses election results and local government spending in Ghana. Samuel Obeng tells Tim Phillips whether a political system created in part to defeat cronyism has worked as intended.
When economists talk about the "household", they usually mean a family. But Natalie Bau and Raquel Fernandez tell Tim Phillips that there are many types of family, with many cultural traditions and habits, and these differences can have a big impact on whether well-meaning attempts to improve their lives will succeed or fail.
For half a century Mexico's rural middle-schoolers have attended "telesecundaria" schools, in which they watch their lessons on TV. It saves money and makes sure that kids have qualified teachers. But, Raissa Fabregas tells Tim Phillips, we don't really know if they provide a good education. Until now.
Cities in developing economies can still learn a lot from our urban past, Ed Glaeser tells Tim Phillips. For thousands of years ancient cities have been coping with migration, transport, disease, new technology and land rights -- precisely the challenges that face fast-expanding new cities today.
In rural areas, about half of people who are available for work are not in full-time employment. Most are self-employed. Are they really entrepreneurs, or would they prefer a job and are they just trying to survive? Supreet Kaur tells Tim Phillips about an experiment that suggests unemployment may be higher than we assume.
We often try to improve incomes and financial decision-making of working people by teaching financial literacy. But in Uganda an intervention tested whether learning by saving in a bank account might also be an effective route to knowledge. If this works, Dean Karlan tells Tim Phillips, it might be a low-cost route to financial inclusion.
When the government in Chile attempts to limit which fish can be caught and sold to protect stocks, market traders always find a way around the restrictions. Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak tells Tim Phillips the story of an experiment in how to enforce regulation -- with a surprise finding that could change how compliance works in other industries too.
How can Somalia's schools inspire kids to finish their education and learn about gender equality? A low-cost intervention uses role models with surprising success, says Munshi Sulaiman of BRAC.
When drug-related violence exploded in Mexico, its effects were felt by everyone. Andrea Velásquez tells Tim Phillips how rising violence in Mexico City affected the willingness of people - especially women - to go to work.
Children decide what's normal for girls and boys early in their development. Seema Jayachandran tells Tim Phillips how a program of discussions about gender equality at school can successfully change damaging attitudes to women's rights.
If you want to succeed as a boss, business books tell you, you have to delegate. But we know less than you think about the impact of delegation on productivity and profitability. Namrata Kala of MIT tells Tim Phillips how some Indian SOEs decided to let managers manage, giving us a new insight into the impact of managerial autonomy.
Often we hear exciting news of crop yields from experimental trials, but then the gains don't show up in the real world. Rachid Laajaj tells Tim Phillips how a group of researchers solved this puzzle, and what this means for how we conduct trials in future.
Councilors who thought performance reports would be published before an election invested more in infrastructure, with positive impacts on re-election Read “Public Information is an Incentive for Politicians: Experimental Evidence from Delhi Elections” by Abhijit Banerjee, Nils Enevoldsen, Rohini Pande, and Michael Walton here .
The introduction of financial institutions in communities may generate long-lasting externalities, including losses in informal social linkages Read “Changes in social network structure in response to exposure to formal credit markets” by Abhijit Banerjee, Emily Breza, Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Esther Duflo, Matthew O. Jackson, and Cynthia Kinnan here .
How automatic payments can help individuals save more and better protect themselves against consumer risks Read “Learning to navigate a new financial technology: Evidence from payroll accounts” by Emily Breza, Martin Kanz, and Leora F. Klapper here.
Access to fast cash through digital credit may put consumers at risk for over-indebtedness and likelihood of default Read “Too fast, too furious? Digital credit delivery speed and repayment rates” by Alfredo Burlando, Michael A. Kuhn, and Silvia Prina here .
Bundling interventions that offer parents health information along with cash transfers might yield more sustainable changes in early-life health outcomes for children
Bundling interventions that offer parents health information along with cash transfers might yield more sustainable changes in early-life health outcomes for children Read “The impacts of a multifaceted pre-natal intervention on human capital accumulation in early life” by Pedro Carneiro, Lucy Kraftman, Giacomo Mason, Lucie Moore, Imran Rasul and Molly Scott here ....
Policymakers might seek to address the frictions that prevent potentially beneficial migration to urban areas from taking place Read “Urban-Rural Gaps in the Developing World: Does Internal Migration Offer Opportunities?” by David Lagakos here .
Despite evidence of increasing household wages, anti-poverty schemes in India can have an adverse effect by lowering human capital investment Read “Workfare and Human Capital Investment: Evidence from India” by Manisha Shah and Bryce Millet Steinberg here .
People are less likely to ask questions in their communities if it exposes the limits of their knowledge. Read “Signaling, shame, and silence in social learning” by Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Benjamin Golub, and He Yang here .
More frequent assessment of student performance fails to deliver on improved outcomes when the administrative burden on teachers is high
Nearly a billion people around the world are not connected to the electricity grid, and even more have unreliable access. In this VoxDevTalk, Robin Burgess discusses his paper with Michael Greenstone, Nicholas Ryan, and Anant Sudarshan in which the authors argue that a social norm that all people deserve access to electricity regardless of payment may actually be undermining the universal access called for in Sustainable Development Goal 7. When people feel no compulsion to pay for the electrici...
Incentivising agent performance is a double-edged sword: while it can encourage agents to perform better, it might also nudge them into cheating and manipulating results to their benefit. In this VoxDevTalk, Guojun He discusses his work with Michael Greenstone, Ruixue Jia, and Tong Liu on this classic principal-agent problem in the context of how Chinese local governments self-report meeting air pollution-reduction targets imposed (and incentivised) by the central government. An analysis of thes...
Certain kinds of NGO-led development projects attract more funding and media attention than others. Child sponsorship or microcredit schemes, for instance, tend to be 'hotter' than rehabilitation projects. To what extent does this knowledge affect the fundraising agenda of NGOs? What causes NGOs to 'cluster' around specific causes in favour of others? And what can be done to diversify NGO (and donor) attention? In this VoxDevTalk, Thierry Verdier examines the motivations of NGO competition and i...
Entrepreneurship across the world is highly male dominated. While the amount of subsistence entrepreneurship in developing countries leads to a slightly more equal gender balance, female entrepreneurs in these countries tend to choose sectors where other women are. In this VoxDevTalk, Nava Ashraf and Ed Glaeser discuss their work with Alexia Delfino investigating how gender norms and weak rule of law put female entrepreneurs at a disadvantage. Fear of expropriation by men leads them to work in l...
When faced with onerous procedures to apply for a job, potential applicants can be expected to weigh the costs of applying on their time and energy against the probability of their getting the job and the eventual benefits. It is widely believed that if recruiters raise the costs of applying for a job, only the most suited and driven candidates can be expected to apply. In this VoxDevTalk, Stefano Caria shares insights from his paper with Girum Abebe and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, in which the author...
When workers are supplied to a company through a temp agency, they earn less than the permanent employees they end up working with. Since work place surveys usually do not capture the pay of outsourced labour, there is insufficient data on the pay differential between contract workers and full-time workers. In this VoxDevTalk, Simon Jäger of MIT discusses a new paper where he and his co-authors estimate how much firms differentiate pay premia between regular and outsourced workers. They overcome...
