Ethnicity has been shown to shape political, social, and economic behavior in Africa, but the underlying mechanisms remain contested. We utilize lab experiments to isolate one mechanism—an individual's bias in...

Background: Adolescent pregnancies pose a risk to the young mothers and their babies. In Zambia, 35% of young girls in rural areas have given birth by the age of 18...

More than one billion people in the world have some kind of disability. Apart from the obvious physical challenges facing disabled people, there may also be psychological barriers that make...

Microenterprises constitute an important source of employment, and developing such enterprises is a key policy concern in most countries. But what is the most efficient tool for microenterprise development? We...

A number of lab experiments in recent years have analyzed people’s willingness to com-pete. But to what extent is competitive behavior in the lab associated with field choicesand outcomes? We...

What ethical criterion for intergenerational justice should be adopted, e.g., when faced with the task of managing the global environment? Koopmans' axiomatization of discounted utilitarianism is based on seemingly compelling...

Field experiments documenting positive treatment effects have a strong policy message: scale up! However, such experiments are typically implemented under close supervision of the research group in charge of the study. In contrast, scaling...

Can a trifle gain to sufficiently many well-off justify imposing a much larger sacrifice on the worst-off? We show that if one answers negatively to such a question, one is...

Fairness considerations fundamentally affect human behavior, but our understanding of the nature and development of people’s fairness preferences is limited. The dictator game has been the standard experimental design for...

What should individuals be held responsible for? This is a fundamental question in much of the contemporary debate on distributive justice. Different fairness ideals, such as strict egalitarianism, and different...

Childhood vaccination is a powerful tool for reducing morbidity and premature deaths, and vaccines are usually provided for free. Despite this, several low- and middle-income countries are lagging far behind...

There is increased awareness that success among small-scale entrepreneurs in developing countries requires more than microfinance, and that an important limiting factor for business growth is the level of human...

It is a central political goal to secure disabled individuals the same opportunities as others to pursue their conception of a good life. This goal reflects an ambition to combine...

A core question in the contemporary debate on distributive justice is how to understand fairness in situations involving production. Important theories of distributive justice, such as strict egalitarianism, liberal egalitarianism,...

A liberal egalitarian theory of justice seeks to combine the values of equality, personal freedom, and personal responsibility. It is considered a much more promising position than strict egalitarianism, because...

Liberal egalitarian theories of justice argue that inequalities arising from non-responsibility factors should be eliminated, but that inequalities arising from responsibility factors should be accepted. This article discusses how the...

Recent literature on tax administration in poor countries suggests there are virtues of allowing fiscal corruption. By strengthening the bargaining power of corrupt tax officers, it is argued that tax...

The Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE) provides a forum for the world's leading development thinkers to share new knowledge and ideas. ABCDE - Europe 2003 presents selected...

Early pregnancies are generally associated with negative effects on women’shealth and education (Goldin & Katz 2002; Rasul 2008), as well as theireconomic achievement (Bailey 2006; Miller 2010). Early pregnancies arealso...

The difference principle, introduced by Rawls (1971, 1993), is generally interpreted as leximin, but this is not how he intended it. Rawls explicitly states that the difference principle requires that...

Which is the most binding constraint to microenterprise development, human capital or financial capital? To answer this question, we present the first field experiment that jointly investigates these two constraints...

There is increased awareness that success among small scale entrepreneurs in developing countries requires more than microfinance, and that an important limiting factor for business growth is the level of...

Why do people in rich countries not transfer more of their income to people in the world's poorest countries? To study this question and the relative importance of needs, entitlements,...

The anti-corruption reform in the Tanzanian tax bureaucracy in the mid-1990s was apparently a short-lived success. In the wake of the reform, a number of "tax experts" established themselves in...

Recent literature on tax administration in poor countries suggests that inducing more fiscal corruption may contribute to reducing tax evasion and increasing tax revenues. But does such an intriguing paradox...

Amartya Sen, in his most recent book Development as Freedom, argues that expansion of human freedom should both be viewed as the primary end and the principle means of development....

Huge reservoirs of natural gas have been discovered offshore the southern coast of Tanzania. There are high expectations that exploitation of natural resources will substantially increase Tanzania’s national income. This...