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Researchers evaluated whether the ethnicities of wholesale buyers and sellers in Chennai, India, affected the transaction terms. They found that traders offered lower prices to buyers of the same ethnicity, but not necessarily because they trusted them more.

Researchers evaluated the impact of additional investments in agriculture on income for subsistence farmers. In rural Mali, giving some farmers unrestricted cash grants led to significantly higher productivity and profits, suggesting farmers would invest more in their farms if they had more capital.

In South Africa, researchers evaluated whether people have enough information to identify reliable borrowers among their peers and if they can help enforce loan repayment. They found that when given incentives, peers were not effective at screening for creditworthiness, but they were effective at...

Youth unemployment—an acute problem in Sub-Saharan Africa—can have long-term negative implications, both on individuals’ quality of life and on broader socio-economic development outcomes. A lack of necessary skills is often cited as contributing to high unemployment, and there is little evidence on...

In Ethiopia, researchers tested whether linking microcredit and family planning services could increase contraceptive use more than either program in isolation. Neither the linked program nor the isolated programs had any detectable impact on contraceptive awareness, use, or intention to use.

Researchers randomly provided more or less cash to garment-making firm owners in Ghana before a bargaining game to evaluate the impact of endowment on the negotiated sale price of a good. Owners of garment-making microenterprises with lower household liquidity agreed to lower sale prices during the...