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Data: Potato Traders in West Bengal: A Survey of Contractual Relations and Market Structure
Our study consists of a pilot survey of a random sub-set of phorias (middlemen) and larger traders who operate in 72 villages of West Medinipur and Hugli districts and their corresponding potato markets. Our goal is to understand the nature of contractual relations between farmers and phorias on the one hand, and between phorias and wholesale traders that they sell to on...
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Data: Household Finance in India
We employ loan-level data on over a million loans disbursed in India between 1995 and 2010 to understand how fast-changing regulation impacted mortgage lending and risk. Our paper uses changes in regulatory treatment discontinuities associated with loan size and leverage to detect regulation-induced loan delinquencies. We also find that an acceleration in the classification...
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Data: Social networks, phone money transfers, and rainfall shocks: evidence from Rwanda
A large literature describes how local risk sharing networks can help individuals smooth consumption in the face of idiosyncratic economic shocks. However, when an entire community faces a large covariate shock, and when the transaction costs of transfers are high, these risk sharing networks are likely to be less effective. In this paper, we document how a new technology...
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Data: Sugar mills: Ownership, productivity and crop choice
An old theoretical and empirical literature has struggled with how ownership structure affects economic outcomes. We seek to answer this question by examining the effect that different ownership structures have on the outcomes of sugarcane farmers in India. The econometric strategy exploits the zoning system - whereby farmers living within a zone are forced to sell sugar to...
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Data: Training Productivity, and Upgrading: Pilot of Evaluation of Female and Supervisor Training Programs in the Bangladesh Apparel Sector
We marketed a training program for lower level managers (line supervisors) to large factories in the Bangladeshi ready-made garment industry. Take-up of the program (even for a free slot) was low, due to intense production pressures, fire-fighting and concerns over retention of trained workers. Take-up is quite insensitive to pricing. There was higher interest and demand in...
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Data: Variation in Infrastructure Delivery and Management Quality Among Ghana’s Local Governments
Many infrastructure projects in developing countries are started but never finished. Despite the vast resources invested in infrastructure and the obvious inefficiency of abandoning projects mid-construction, there is little research on this problem. I have collected, digitized, and coded administrative records of over 14,000 local government infrastructure projects in...
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Data: Tournaments for Postings: Using Transfers and Postings as an Incentive for Property Tax Inspectors in Pakistan
Bureaucracies often post staff to better or worse locations, ostensibly to provide incentives. Yet we know little about whether this works, with heterogeneity in preferences over postings impacting effectiveness. We propose a performance-ranked serial dictatorship mechanism, whereby bureaucrats sequentially choose desired locations in order of performance. We evaluate this...
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Data: Prepaid Electricity Metering: Costs, Benefits and Potential for Scale-up
The standard approach to recovering the cost of electricity provision is to bill customers monthly for past consumption. If unable to pay, customers face disconnection, the utility loses revenue, and the service provision model is undermined. A possible solution to this problem is prepaid metering, in which customers buy electricity upfront and use it until the prepaid...
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Data: Health Costs of Energy related Air Pollution in South Africa
The link between pollution and poor health and mortality has been established globally. Developing countries carry most of the burden of ill health from air pollution, and urban centres like the City of Cape Town even more so. Effective air quality management to protect human health relies on the attainment of air quality standards. This study uses the Benefits Mapping and...
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Data: Political Violence in Pakistan: Understanding Subnational Patterns
Political violence has long been endemic in Pakistan, but the scale, scope, and geographic distribution of the problem has not been systematically studied. On the policy side, decision makers lack credible quantitative data with which to weigh the relative costs of politically-motivated violence against the many other challenges facing Pakistan. On the academic side,...