An all-or-nothing view of financial access leading to overly simplistic policy
recommendations has been largely overturned in the data. Heterogeneity and explicit …

A key challenge for policymakers in low-and middle-income countries is to design a method
to select beneficiaries of social programs when income is unobservable and volatile. We use …

Many government social insurance policies have low take-up. To understand whether this is
due to administrative barriers, information, or low valuation of the insurance, we study an …

Aid agencies and their donors are highly attuned to simultaneous goals of targeting
efficiency and program impact. We analyze the relationship between these two aspects of …

Formal and informal financial systems are crucial to the global economy, enabling
individuals and businesses to access financial services. To better understand these …

We examine how allocating a fixed social assistance budget across localities using different
prioritization rules affects both beneficiary selection and program effectiveness. By …

Perhaps the most central insight of development economics is that, absent a complete set of
perfect markets, households' economic activities cannot be neatly “separated” into those of a …

We show how new digital technologies can be used to improve safety nets for insurance
against idiosyncratic and aggregate income risks, tailored to deal specifically with well …

Many government social insurance policies have low take-up. To understand whether this is
due to administrative barriers, information, or low valuation of the insurance, we study an …

Agricultural markets often fail to allocate resources efficiently across farm households in
developing countries. However, policymakers require knowledge of which markets fail and …