Social Protection and Social Distancing During the Pandemic: Mobile Money Transfers in Ghana Dean Karlan, Matt Lowe, Robert Osei, Isaac Osei-Akoto, Benjamin N. Roth and Christopher Udry Abstract We study the impact of mobile money transfers to a representative sample of low-income Ghanaians during the COVID-19 pandemic. The announcement of the upcoming transfers affects […]
BREAD Working Paper No. 609, July 2022
Does the Invisible Hand Efficiently Guide Entry and Exit? Abhijit Banerjee, Greg Fischer, Dean Karlan, Matt Lowe, and Benjamin N. Roth Abstract What accounts for the ubiquity of small vendors operating side-by-side in the urban centers of developing countries? Why don’t competitive forces drive some vendors out of the market? We ran an experiment […]
BREAD Working Paper No. 534
Debt Traps? Market Vendors and Moneylender Debt in India and the Philippines Dean Karlan, Sendhil Mullainathan, Benjamin N. Roth Abstract A debt trap occurs when someone takes on a high-interest rate loan and is barely able to pay back the interest, and thus perpetually finds themselves in debt (often by re-financing). Studying such practices is […]