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Project
Testing the impact of contracts to improve financial access for small firms
Access to finance for the purchase of productive assets is central to the success of small firms. This project studies three scalable financial instruments designed to address behavioural constraints that may limit small firms’ financial access, investment and technology adoption: asset-collateralised loans (ACLs); layaway contracts; and a hybrid layaway-ACL...
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Project
Behavioural barriers to energy efficiency in development contexts: evidence from charcoal cookstoves
This project aims to quantify how behavioural biases and market frictions affect poor households’ adoption and usage of energy efficient durables. This will be the first paper to rigorously quantify the energy efficiency gap, causally identify the mechanisms driving this gap and estimate its welfare effects, and it will do so in a high-stakes development setting. In...
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Project
Harnessing technology to exorcise ghosts
Ghana, as a developing country, has always been strapped of resources to promote growth and development. Revenue mobilised has never been sufficient for taking care of recurrent expenditure, and therefore the country has had to rely heavily on external grants and loans to support development projects. A closer look at the budget of the Government of Ghana shows that much...
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Project
Job creation ecosystems in African secondary cities: A study of Uganda
Both international organisations and African governments increasingly acknowledge that secondary cities are pivotal in fostering the development of inclusive, productive and job-rich growth. However, despite the growing emphasis on balanced urbanisation processes and investment in secondary cities, national strategies around these issues are often devised with little...
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Project
Refugees and the choice between cities and settlements: Evidence from Uganda
In 2018, Uganda hosted approximately 1.2 million refugees from various countries such as South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country’s refugee policy, which has been praised internationally, entitles refugees to a small plot of land to cultivate, food ratios and rights to access the same health and education services like the ones offered to...
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Project
Clientelism and the politics of social protection in Kenya
Social protection programmes, such as cash transfer programmes, are rapidly expanding in Africa. In principle, social programs are designed to alleviate poverty, and there is evidence that they can have a positive welfare impact. Yet social programs can also be subject to intense political manipulation, which can undermine their potential benefits. A crucial...
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Project
Do financial incentives in a health setting have a dark side: Experimental evidence from Zambia
Agency Theory postulates that the use of financial incentives in multitasking or multidimensional settings such as in health settings can potentially result in two opposing effects. First, an effort enhancing effect where agents react to the financial incentive by enhancing their effort and productivity. Second, the theory postulates that in contexts in which the financial...
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Project
Informal taxation and redistribution: a study of community driven provision of public goods in Myanmar
Informal taxation is a crucial source of public goods financing in many developing countries. In Myanmar, data collected by the IGC in 2016 showed that financial payments to non-state actors and direct contributions to development projects amount to about 8% of total household expenditure, twice as much as direct tax payments (McCarthy, 2016). These resources are channelled...
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Project
Negotiating a better future: Tracking girls for post-secondary follow-up
This study evaluates the long-term effects of a randomised control trial that taught Zambian adolescent girls negotiation skills in 2013. The study focused on adolescent girls both because growing evidence suggests that adolescence is a critical period for the development of non-cognitive interpersonal skills (Choudhury, Blakemore, and Charman, 2006), and because...
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Project
Hawassa Industrial Park administrative data collection support
The Government of Ethiopia has embarked on an ambitious industrialisation strategy based on the creation of special economic zones as centres of export-oriented light manufacturing. The flagship industrial park of this strategy is located in the city of Hawassa, in Ethiopia's Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s (SNNP) Region. At full capacity, the Hawassa...
Project
Female politicians and economic growth: Evidence from state elections in India
The project studies close elections between men and women for election to India's state legislative assemblies. It finds significantly higher growth in economic activity in constituencies that elect women. Given average GDP growth in India of about 7% per year (during the study period), the researchers estimate the growth premium for constituencies from having a...