Many research and policy questions surrounding migration are causal questions. What causes people to migrate? What are the consequences of migration for the migrants, their families, and their communities?...
A randomized experiment among poor entrepreneurs tested the impact of exogenously inducing higher financial aspirations. In theory, raising aspirations could have positive effects by inducing higher effort...
Financial products and transfer schemes are often designed to help individuals improve welfare by following through on intertemporal plans. This paper implements an artefactual field experiment in Malawi...
The World Bank Research Observer is intended for anyone who has a professional interest in development. Observer articles are written to be accessible to nonspecialist readers; contributors examine key...
International migration offers individuals and their families the potential to experience immediate and large gains in their incomes and offers a number of other positive benefits to the sending communities...
International migration offers individuals and their families the potential to experience immediate and large gains in their incomes, and offers a large number of other positive benefits to the sending...
This note summarizes a proof of concept trial of a new product designed to allow migrants to send remittances for educational purposes. Migrant remittances are one of the largest international financial...
This paper tests how migrants' willingness to remit changes when given the ability to direct remittances to educational purposes using different forms of commitment. Variants of a dictator game in a lab-in-the-field...
The authors use an original panel dataset of migrant departures from the Philippines to identify the responsiveness of migrant numbers and wages to gross domestic product (GDP) shocks in destination countries...
Significant income gains from migrating from poorer to richer countries have motivated unilateral (source-country) policies facilitating labor emigration. However, their effectiveness is unknown. The authors...
This brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study, entitled Are rural road investments alone sufficient to generate transport flows? Lessons from a randomized experiment in rural Malawi...
This brief summarizes the insurance, credit, and technology adoption: field experimental evidence from Malawi. The farmers were offered loans for the November 2006 planting season. Does production risk...
The very poor in developing countries often make intertemporal choices that seem at odds with their individual self-interest. There are many possible reasons why. This paper investigates several of these...
The authors use an original panel dataset of migrant departures from the Philippines to identify the responsiveness of migrant numbers and wages to gross domestic product shocks in destination countries...
This paper reports the results of a field experiment that randomly assigned smallholder cash crop farmers formal savings accounts. In collaboration with a microfinance institution in Malawi, the authors...
This paper draws lessons from an original randomized experiment in Malawi. In order to understand why roads in relatively good condition in rural areas may not be used by buses, a minibus service was subsidized...
How do borrowers respond to improvements in a lender's ability to punish defaulters? This paper reports the results of a randomized field experiment in rural Malawi that examines the impact of fingerprinting...
The decision of whether or not to migrate has far-reaching consequences for the lives of individuals and their families. But the very nature of this choice makes identifying the impacts of migration difficult...
The adoption of new agricultural technologies may be discouraged because of their inherent riskiness. This study implemented a randomized field experiment to ask whether the provision of insurance against...
Several facts motivate this study. First, life in developing countries is prone to many kinds of risk, such as crop and income loss due to natural disasters (weather, insect infestations, and fire) and...