Constraints to growth for medium-sized enterprises in low-income countries remain a puzzle and a challenge, for academics and policymakers respectively. We collaborated with a lender in Egypt to examine whether some borrowers already in their portfolio could make profitable use of radically larger...

Do capital grants improve microenterprise productivity? We use the lens of a production function to re-examine two previous randomized controlled trials that allocated capital to microenterprises. We find that productivity is higher for treated firms, and accounts for about 20-30 percent of the...

There has been a dramatic rise in the use of the local delivery model for development interventions, where local agents are hired as intermediaries to target interventions to potential beneficiaries. We study this model in the context of a standard agricultural extension intervention in Uganda, in a...

In this paper, we use a unique two-stage experiment that randomized access to school vouchers across both markets and students in rural India to estimate the revealed preference value of school choice. In the first step of the research design, we develop an empirical model of school choice subject...

This paper tests experiential learning as a debiasing tool to reduce gambling in South Africa, through a randomized field experiment. The study implements a simple, interactive game that simulates the odds of winning the national lottery through dice rolling. Participants first roll one die until...

This paper tests experiential learning as a debiasing tool to reduce gambling in South Africa, through a randomized field experiment. The study implements a simple, interactive game that simulates the odds of winning the national lottery through dice rolling. Participants first roll one die until...

Poor households often rely on transfers from their social networks for consumption smoothing, yet there is limited evidence on how antipoverty programs affect informal transfers. This paper exploits the randomized rollout of BRAC’s ultra-poor graduation program in Bangladesh and panel data covering...

We study the effects of a policy that distributed large cash grants through school councils to public schools in rural Pakistan. Using a village-level randomized control trial, we identify the medium-term equilibrium effects of this policy in a marketplace where the private sector is large, and...

We begin by presenting novel administrative evidence from 840 401(k) plans with automatic enrollment (AE) indicating that the risk of retirement insecurity extends to a significant share of actual enrollees. Hypothesizing that this risk is materially affected by the initial decision to enroll at the...

Economists have advanced several psychological frictions to explain why many 401(k)-eligible employees undersave for retirement despite generous matching incentives. We provide evidence on four of these frictions through a field experiment randomizing undersaving employees to information- and...

Job seekers often face substantial information frictions related to potential job quality. This is especially true in international labor markets, where intermediaries match prospective migrants with employers abroad. We ran a randomized trial in Indonesia to explore how information about...