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Floods are an extremely destructive and increasingly common threat to rural agricultural households in countries without strong social safety nets. Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to study the welfare impacts of a new microcredit product which guarantees credit access to agricultural...

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.

In Bangladesh, researchers evaluated how varying husband-wife dynamics, information, and prices could affect purchases of widely available “improved” stoves, which substantially reduce indoor air pollution. They found that women have stronger preferences for improved stoves than their husbands, but...

In the context of a recent government policy that reduced costs of formalization, researchers provided information on the formal entry process through workshops and personalized visits to determine the impacts of information on firms’ decision to formalize.

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...