Working Papers

Strengthening Fragile States:  Evidence from Mobile Salary Payments in Afghanistan [PDF] [Archived June 2023 Draft]

Revise and Resubmit, Review of Economic Studies

(with Joshua Blumenstock, Anastasiia Faikina, Stefano Fiorin, and Tarek Ghani)

  • We conduct a randomized evaluation of a flagship Afghan government initiative aimed at building state administrative capacity during a period when the state faced existential uncertainty. The program aimed to modernize employee tracking and salary payments in the Ministry of Education through biometric registration and digital payment systems. The reform reduced payment delays, decreased teacher turnover, modestly improved student learning outcomes, and expanded financial inclusion, though delays increased substantially during the first year. Employee enrollment was higher in districts where citizens had greater confidence in and consensus about the government’s prospects to the Taliban. These findings indicate that building administrative capacity can improve state performance in fragile states, and suggest that the existential uncertainty inherent in state fragility hinders the development of such state capacity.

Measuring Religion From Behavior: Violence, Economic Shocks, and Religious Adherence in Afghanistan [PDF]

Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Political Economy

(with Oeindrila Dube and Joshua Blumenstock)

  • Religion plays a fundamental role in society but is often difficult to measure. We develop a novel method for measuring religious adherence that is based on decreases in digital activity during periods set aside for prayer. We apply this approach to a dataset of roughly 23 billion phone calls to study determinants of religious practice in Afghanistan. We find that religious adherence decreases after violent attacks by Islamist insurgents but increases in response to climate-driven economic shocks. This approach creates new avenues for studying religious behavior in contexts where traditional measures of religion are unavailable or unreliable.

From People’s War to People’s Rule: Rebel Governance and the Foundations of Inclusive Democracy [Draft available on request]

(with Bhishma Bhusal, Saad Gulzar, Soledad Prillaman, Rohini Pande, and Deepak Singhania)

Publications

Can Digital Aid Deliver During Humanitarian Crises? [PDF] [Published Version]

Management Science. 2025.

(with Miguel Fajardo-Steinhauser, Michael Findley, and Tarek Ghani)

  • Can digital payments help reduce extreme hunger? Humanitarian needs are at their highest since 1945, aid budgets are falling behind, and hunger is concentrating in fragile states where repression and aid diversion present major obstacles. In such contexts, partnering directly with governments is often neither feasible nor desirable, making private digital payment platforms a potentially useful means of delivering assistance. We experimentally evaluated digital payments to extremely poor, female-headed households in Afghanistan, as part of a partnership between community, nonprofit, and private organizations. The payments led to substantial improvements in food security and mental well-being. Despite beneficiaries’ limited tech literacy, 99.75% used the payments, and stringent checks revealed no evidence of diversion. Before seeing our results, policymakers and experts are uncertain and skeptical about digital aid, consistent with the lack of prior evidence on digital payments for humanitarian response. Delivery costs are under 7 cents per dollar, which is 10 cents per dollar less than the World Food Programme’s global figure for cash-based transfers. These savings can help reduce hunger without additional resources, demonstrating how hybrid partnerships utilizing digital payment platforms can help address grand challenges in difficult contexts.

Personalities and Public Sector Performance: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan [PDF] [Published Version]

Economic Development and Cultural Change.  2025. 

(with Saad Gulzar, Muhammad Yasir Khan, and Arman Rezaee)

  • This paper presents evidence that selecting better people to work in government and improving their incentives are complements in improving government effectiveness. To do so, this paper combines a policy that improved incentives for health service delivery in Punjab, Pakistan, with data on health worker personalities. We present three key results. First, government doctors with higher personality scores perform better, even under status quo incentives. Second, health inspectors with higher personality scores exhibit larger treatment responses when incentives are reformed. Last, senior health officials with higher personality scores respond more to data on staff absence by compelling better subsequent attendance.

Experiments About Institutions [PDF] [Published Version]

Annual Review of Economics. 2024. 

(with Jonathan L. Weigel and Noam Yuchtman)

  • Institutions are a key determinant of economic growth, but the critical junctures in which institutions can change are not precisely defined. For example, such junctures are often identified ex post, raising several methodological problems: a selection on the outcome of institutional change; an inability to study beliefs, which are central to coordination and thus the process of institutional change; and an inability to conduct experiments to identify causal effects. We argue that critical junctures are identifiable in real time as moments of deep uncertainty about future institutions. Consistent with this conception, the papers reviewed (a) examine changes to institutions, i.e., the fundamental rules of the game; (b) are real-time studies of plausible critical junctures; and (c) use field experiments to achieve causal identification. We also advocate for more systematic measurement of beliefs about future institutions to identify critical junctures as they happen and provide an empirical proof of concept. Such work is urgent given contemporary critical junctures arising from democratic backsliding, state fragility, climate change, and conflicts over the rights of the marginalized.

Extending the Formal State: The Case of Pakistan's Frontier Crimes Regulation [PDF] [Published Version]

Economica. 2024. 

(with Saad Gulzar, Arman Rezaee, and Jacob N. Shapiro)

  • Why do modern states allow parts of their territory to be governed by non-state actors? We study this question using the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) in Pakistan, a British Colonial law abrogated only in 2018, which left governance to pre-colonial tribal councils in large parts of modern day Pakistan. In areas where the FCR did not apply, the British and then Pakistani state built modern political and bureaucratic institutions. Using primary legal documents, we build a dataset of when and where the FCR applied between 1901 and 2012. The territorial extent of the formal state is both cleanly demarcated by this law and varies substantially over time, permitting an empirical examination of the determinants of state control. The data reveal that the Green Revolution's potential to transform agriculture played a major role in extending the formal state. The law was repealed first from areas where agricultural productivity benefited the most from the Green Revolution. This is consistent with a model in which technological changes that shift the returns to control influence where states choose to govern.

Violence and Financial Decisions: Evidence from Mobile Money in Afghanistan [PDF] [Published Version]

Review of Economics and Statistics. 2024. 

(with Joshua Blumenstock, Robert Gonzalez, and Tarek Ghani)

  • We provide evidence that violence reduces the adoption and use of mobile money in three separate empirical settings in Afghanistan. First, analyzing nationwide mobile money transaction logs, we find that users exposed to violence reduce use of mobile money. Second, using panel survey data from a field experiment, we show that subjects expecting violence are significantly less likely to respond to random inducements to use mobile money. Finally, analyzing nationwide financial survey data, we find that individuals expecting violence hold more cash. Collectively, this evidence suggests that violence can impede the growth of formal financial systems.

Using Preference Estimates to Customize Incentives: An Application to Polio Vaccination Drives in Pakistan. [PDF] [Published Version]

Journal of the European Economic Association. 2023. 

(with James Andreoni, Karrar Hussain Jaffar, Muhammad Yasir Khan, and Charles Sprenger)

  • We use estimates of time preferences to customize incentives for polio vaccinators in Lahore, Pakistan. We measure time preferences using intertemporal allocations of effort, and use these estimates to construct individually tailored incentives. We evaluate the effect of matching contract terms to discounting parameters in a subsequent experiment with the same vaccinators. Our tailored policy is compared with alternatives that either rely on atheoretic reduced-form relationships for policy guidance or apply the same policy to all individuals. We find that contracts tailored to individual discounting outperform this range of policy alternatives.

The Political Economy of Public Sector Absence [PDF] [Published Version]

Journal of Public Economics. 2023. 

(with Saad Gulzar, Ali Hasanain, Arman Rezaee, and Muhammad Yasir Khan)

  • The paper examines how politics relates to public sector absenteeism, a chronic and intractable public service delivery problem in many developing countries. In Punjab, Pakistan, we document that political interference routinely protects doctors from bureaucratic sanction, while personal connections between doctors and politicians and a lack of political competition are associated with more doctor absence. We then examine how politics impacts the success of an at-scale policy reform to combat absenteeism. We find that the reform was more effective at increasing doctor attendance in politically competitive constituencies, both through increased monitoring and through senior health officials being able to respond more effectively to the data gathered on poor performing clinics. Our results demonstrate that politics can block the success of reform; instead of lifting poor performers up, the reform only improved places that had already been performing better. The evidence collectively points to the fundamental importance of accounting for political incentives in policy design and implementation.

Three Sins: The Disconnect Between De Jure Institutions and De Facto Power in Afghanistan [Open Access Published Version]

London School of Economics Public Policy Review. 2022. 

(with Shahim Kabuli)

  • Three key issues that would plague the Afghan government were woven into its fabric from the beginning. First, the Afghan government initiated at the Bonn conference in 2001 explicitly excluded the Taliban. This is widely argued to be the ‘original sin’ that stymied subsequent political development. This exclusionary decision gave the Taliban and their supporters no choice other than to sustain violent conflict, deepen ties to Pakistan, and seek more favourable terms or an outright victory. This was not the only sin. Second, the government adopted an electoral system that combined large multi-member districts with a single non-transferable vote (SNTV). This obscure system is used almost nowhere in the world precisely because it is known to be politically divisive and to undermine the development of political parties. This, in turn, limited the potential for groups focused on shared political agendas to emerge. Third, the highly centralized presidential system created by the 2004 constitution – which copied many elements of Zahir Shah’s 1964 constitution – did not accommodate Afghanistan’s rich diversity and the reality that de facto power is decentralized. These three features of Afghan institutions ensured that a broad-based and inclusive government capable of providing stability, safety, liberty, and economic opportunity to Afghans would not emerge, even with unprecedented levels of international assistance. These exclusionary, divisive, and centralized political institutions were fundamentally out of sync with Afghanistan’s political realities and encumbered the development of an effective state.

COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance and Hesitancy in Low- and Middle-Income Countries [PDF] [Published Version]

Nature: Medicine. 2021.

(with many coauthors listed in the published version)

  • Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is crucial for achieving sufficient immunization coverage to end the global pandemic, yet few studies have investigated COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in lower-income countries, where large-scale vaccination is just beginning. We analyze COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 15 survey samples covering 10 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa and South America, Russia (an upper-middle-income country) and the United States, including a total of 44,260 individuals. We find considerably higher willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine in our LMIC samples (mean 80.3%; median 78%; range 30.1 percentage points) compared with the United States (mean 64.6%) and Russia (mean 30.4%). Vaccine acceptance in LMICs is primarily explained by an interest in personal protection against COVID-19, while concern about side effects is the most common reason for hesitancy. Health workers are the most trusted sources of guidance about COVID-19 vaccines. Evidence from this sample of LMICs suggests that prioritizing vaccine distribution to the Global South should yield high returns in advancing global immunization coverage. Vaccination campaigns should focus on translating the high levels of stated acceptance into actual uptake. Messages highlighting vaccine efficacy and safety, delivered by healthcare workers, could be effective for addressing any remaining hesitancy in the analyzed LMICs.

Political Identity: Experimental Evidence on Anti-Americanism in Pakistan [PDF] [Published Version]

Journal of the European Economic Association. 2020.

(with Leonardo Bursztyn, Bruno Ferman, Saad Gulzar, Ali Hasanain, and Noam Yuchtman)

  • We identify Pakistani men’s willingness to pay to preserve their anti-American identity using two experiments imposing clearly-specified financial costs on anti-American expression, with minimal consequential or social considerations. In two distinct studies, one-quarter to one-third of subjects forgo payments from the U.S. government worth around one-fifth of a day’s wage to avoid an identity-threatening choice: anonymously checking a box indicating gratitude toward the U.S. government. We find sensitivity to both payment size and anticipated social context: when subjects anticipate that rejection will be observable by others, rejection falls suggesting that, for some, social image can outweigh self-image.

Data and Policy Decisions: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan [PDF] [Published Version]

Journal of Development Economics. 2020.

(with Saad Gulzar, Ali Hasanain, Muhammad Yasir Khan, and Arman Rezaee)

  • We evaluate a program in Pakistan that equips government health inspectors with a smartphone app which channels data on rural clinics to senior policy makers. The system led to rural clinics being inspected 104% more often after 6 months, but only 43.8% more often after a year, with the latter estimate not attaining significance at conventional levels. There is also no clear evidence that the increase in inspections led to increases in general staff attendance. In addition, we test whether senior officials act on the information provided by the system. Focusing only on districts where the app is deployed, we find that highlighting poorly performing facilities on a dashboard viewed by supervisors raises doctor attendance by 75%. Our results indicate that technology may be able to mobilize data to useful effect, even in low capacity settings.

Can Political Alignment Be Costly? [PDF] [Published Version]

Journal of Politics. 2020.

(with Saad Gulzar and Arman Rezaee)

  • Research on the benefits of political alignment suggests that voters who elect governing party politicians are better off than those who elect other politicians. We examine this claim with regression discontinuity designs that isolate the effect of electing a governing party politician on an important publicly provided service in Pakistan: health. Consistent with existing research, governing party constituents receive a higher quantity of services; more doctors are assigned to work in governing party areas. However, despite many more assigned doctors, there is no increase in doctor attendance. These findings contrast with the literature on political alignment by showing that alignment to the governing party affects voters’ welfare ambiguously: higher potential quantity of services may come at the cost of lower quality.

What are the Headwaters of Formal Savings? Experimental Evidence from Sri Lanka [PDF] [Published Version] [Appendix]

Review of Economic Studies. 2019.

(with Suresh de Mel, Craig McIntosh, and Chris Woodruff)

  • The world’s poor are seeing a rapid expansion in access to formal savings accounts. What is the source of savings when households are connected to a formal account? We combine a high-frequency panel survey spanning two and a half years with an experiment in which a Sri Lankan bank used mobile Point-of-Service (POS) terminals to collect deposits directly from households each week. We find that the headwaters of formal savings lie in sacrificed leisure time: households work more, and improved savings options generate an increase in labour effort in both self-employment and in the wage market. The results suggest that the labour allocation channel is an important mechanism linking savings opportunities to income.

Election Fairness and Government Legitimacy in Afghanistan [PDF] [Published Version]

 Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. 2019.

(with Eli Berman, Clark Gibson,  James D. Long, and Arman Rezaee)

  • Elections can enhance state legitimacy. One way is by improving citizens’ attitudes toward government, thereby increasing their willingness to comply with rules and regulations. We investigate whether reducing fraud in elections improves attitudes toward government in a fragile state. A large, randomly assigned fraud-reducing intervention in Afghan elections leads to improvement in two indices, one measuring attitudes toward their government, and another measuring stated willingness to comply with governance. Thus, reducing electoral fraud may offer a practical, cost-effective method of enhancing governance in a fragile state.

Damaging Democracy? Security Provision and Turnout in Afghan Elections [PDF] [Published Version]

Economics and Politics. 2019.

(with Luke N. Condra , Radha Iyengar, James D. Long, and Jacob N. Shapiro)

  • In emerging democracies, elections are encouraged as a route to democratization. However, not only does violence often threaten these elections, but citizens often view as corrupt the security forces deployed to combat violence. We examine the effects of such security provision. In Afghanistan's 2010 parliamentary election, polling centers with similar histories of pre-election violence unintentionally received different deployments of the Afghan National Police, enabling identification of police's effects on turnout. Using data from the universe of polling sites and various household surveys, data usually unavailable in conflict settings, we estimate increases in police presence decreased voter turnout by an average of 30%. Our results adjudicate between competing theoretical mechanisms through which security forces could affect turnout, and show behavior is not driven by voter anticipation of election-day violence. This highlights a pitfall for building government legitimacy via elections in weakly institutionalized and conflict-affected states.

Why Do Defaults Affect Behavior? Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan [PDF] [Published Version]

American Economic Review. 2018.

(with Joshua Blumenstock and Tarek Ghani)

  • We report on an experiment examining why default options impact behavior. By randomly assigning employees to different varieties of a salary-linked savings account, we find that default enrollment increases participation by 40 percentage points—an effect equivalent to providing a 50% matching incentive. We then use a series of experimental interventions to differentiate between explanations for the default effect, which we conclude is driven largely by present-biased preferences and the cognitive cost of thinking through different savings scenarios. Default assignment also changes employees' attitudes toward saving, and makes them more likely to actively decide to save after the study concludes.

Improving Electoral Integrity with Information Communications  Technology [PDF] [Published Version]

Journal of Experimental Political Science. 2016.

(with Clark Gibson, Danielle F. Jung, and James D. Long)

  • Irregularities plague elections in developing democracies. The international community spends hundreds of millions of dollars on election observation, with little robust evidence that it consistently improves electoral integrity. We conducted a randomized control trial to measure the effect of an intervention to detect and deter electoral irregularities employing a nation-wide sample of polling stations in Uganda using scalable information and communications technology (ICT). In treatment stations, researchers delivered letters to polling officials stating that tallies would be photographed using smartphones and compared against official results. Compared to stations with no letters, the letters increased the frequency of posted tallies by polling center managers in compliance with the law; decreased the number of sequential digits found on tallies – a fraud indicator; and decreased the vote share for the incumbent president in some specifications. Our results demonstrate that a cost-effective citizen and ICT intervention can improve electoral integrity in emerging democracies.

Institutional Corruption and Election Fraud: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan [PDF] [Published Version]

American Economic Review. 2015.

(with James D. Long)

  • We investigate the relationship between political networks, weak institutions, and election fraud during the 2010 parliamentary election in Afghanistan combining: (i) data on political connections between candidates and election officials; (ii) a nationwide controlled evaluation of a novel monitoring technology; and (iii) direct measurements of aggregation fraud. We find considerable evidence of aggregation fraud in favor of connected candidates and that the announcement of a new monitoring technology reduced theft of election materials by about 60 percent and vote counts for connected candidates by about 25 percent. The results have implications for electoral competition and are potentially actionable for policymakers.

Promises and Pitfalls of Mobile Money in Afghanistan: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial [PDF] [Published Version]

Proceedings of the Fifth ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development Association for Computing Machinery. 2015. 

(with Joshua Blumenstock and Tarek Ghani)

  • Despite substantial interest in the potential for mobile money to positively impact the lives of the poor, little empirical evidence exists to substantiate these claims. In this paper, we present the results of a field experiment in Afghanistan that was designed to increase adoption of mobile money, and determine if such adoption led to measurable changes in the lives of the adopters. The specific intervention we evaluate is a mobile salary payment program, in which a random subset of individuals of a large firm were transitioned into receiving their regular salaries in mobile money rather than in cash.

    We separately analyze the impact of this transition on both the employer and the individual employees. For the employer, there were immediate and significant cost savings; in a dangerous physical environment, they were able to effectively shift the costs of managing their salary supply chain to the mobile phone operator. For individual employees, however, the results were more ambiguous. Individuals who were transitioned onto mobile salary payments were more likely to use mobile money, and there is evidence that these accounts were used to accumulate small balances that may be indicative of savings. However, we find little consistent evidence that mobile money had an immediate or significant impact on several key indicators of individual wealth or well-being. Taken together, these results suggest that while mobile salary payments may increase the efficiency and transparency of traditional systems, in the short run the benefits may be realized by those making the payments, rather than by those receiving them.

Pooling Risk Among Countries [PDF] [Published Version]

Journal of International Economics. 2015.

(with Jean Imbs and Paulo Mauro)

  • Suppose that international sharing risk—worldwide or with large numbers of countries—were costly. How much risk-sharing could be gained in small sets (or “pools”) of countries? To answer this question, we compute the means and variances of poolwide gross domestic product growth, for all possible pools of any size drawn from a sample of 74 countries, and compare them with the means and variances of consumption growth in each country individually. From the difference, we infer potential diversification and welfare gains. As much as two-thirds of the first best, full worldwide welfare gains can be obtained in groupings of as few as seven countries. The largest potential gains arise from pools consisting of countries in different regions and including countries with weak institutions. We argue that international risk-sharing fails to emerge because the largest potential gains are among countries that do not trust each other's willingness and ability to abide by international contractual obligations.

Catastrophes and Time Preference [PDF] [Published Version]

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. 2015.

  • We provide evidence suggesting that exposure to the Indian Ocean Earthquake tsunami increased patience in a sample of Sri Lankan wage workers. We develop a framework to characterize the various channels through which disaster exposure could affect measures of patience. Drawing on this framework, we show that a battery of empirical tests support the argument that the increase in measured patience reflects a change in time preference and not selective exposure to the event, migration related to the tsunami, or other changes in the economic environment which affect experimental patience measures. The results have implications for policies aimed at disaster recovery and for the literature linking life events to economic preferences.

Violence and Risk Preference: Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan [PDF] [Published Version]

American Economic Review. 2014.

(with Mohammad Isaqzadeh, James D. Long, and Charles Sprenger)

  • We investigate the relationship between violence and economic risk preferences in Afghanistan combining: (i) a two-part experimental procedure identifying risk preferences, violations of Expected Utility, and specific preferences for certainty; (ii) controlled recollection of fear based on established methods from psychology; and (iii) administrative violence data from precisely geocoded military records. We document a specific preference for certainty in violation of Expected Utility. The preference for certainty, which we term a Certainty Premium, is exacerbated by the combination of violent exposure and controlled fearful recollections. The results have implications for risk taking and are potentially actionable for policymakers and marketers.

Violence, Control and Election Fraud: Evidence from Afghanistan [PDF] [Published Version]

British Journal of Political Science. 2013.

(with Nils B. Weidmann)

  • What explains local variation in electoral manipulation in countries with ongoing internal conflict? The theory of election fraud developed in this article relies on the candidates’ loyalty networks as the agents manipulating the electoral process. It predicts (i) that the relationship between violence and fraud follows an inverted U-shape and (ii) that loyalty networks of both incumbent and challenger react differently to the security situation on the ground. Disaggregated violence and election results data from the 2009 Afghanistan presidential election provide empirical results consistent with this theory. Fraud is measured both by a forensic measure, and by using results from a visual inspection of a random sample of the ballot boxes. The results align with the two predicted relationships, and are robust to other violence and fraud measures.

Improving Public Health Delivery in Punjab, Pakistan: Issues and Opportunities [PDF] [Published Version]

Lahore Journal of Economics. 2013.

(with Saad Gulzar, Ali Hasanain, Abdul Rehman Khan, Muhammad Yasir Khan, and Muhammad Zia Mehmood)

  • Pakistan has a large and dispersed primary public health system that gives citizens access to trained doctors and staff, and to subsidized medicines. However, both the use of these facilities and health outcomes remain low. Improvements in information and communications technology provide exciting opportunities to leverage technology to improve management. This paper presents a detailed qualitative and quantitative study of the institutional context in which such interventions in the public health sector in Punjab would be trialed. We describe the structure and management of primary healthcare facilities, present selected results from a survey of a representative sample of basic health units, and identify some key issues. We also report and discuss officials’ responses to the question of how services might be improved.

Do Working Men Rebel? Insurgency and Unemployment in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines [PDF] [Published Version]

Journal of Conflict Resolution. 2011.

(with Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, and Jacob N. Shapiro)

  • Most aid spending by governments seeking to rebuild social and political order is based on an opportunity-cost theory of distracting potential recruits. The logic is that gainfully employed young men are less likely to participate in political violence, implying a positive correlation between unemployment and violence in locations with active insurgencies. The authors test that prediction in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines, using survey data on unemployment and two newly available measures of insurgency: (1) attacks against government and allied forces and (2) violence that kill civilians. Contrary to the opportunity-cost theory, the data emphatically reject a positive correlation between unemployment and attacks against government and allied forces (p < .05 percent). There is no significant relationship between unemployment and the rate of insurgent attacks that kill civilians. The authors identify several potential explanations, introducing the notion of insurgent precision to adjudicate between the possibilities that predation on one hand, and security measures and information costs on the other, account for the negative correlation between unemployment and violence in these three conflicts.

Selected Research in Progress

Does Knowledge Empower? Experimental Evidence from the Oppressed

(with Noam Angrist, Claire Cullen, Anaya Dam, and Oeindrila Dube)

Beliefs About Institutions

(with  Stefano Fiorin, Rohini Pande, Soledad Prillaman, Jonathan Weigel, and Noam Yuchtman)

Disentangling Candidate Supply, Party Demand, and Voter Demand in Women's Political Underrepresentation

(with Stefano Fiorin, Rohini Pande, and Soledad Prillaman)

Strengthening Women’s Representation: Testing the Impact of Cross-Party Political Networks

(with Stefano Fiorin, Prabin Khadka, Rohini Pande, and Soledad Prillaman)

Additional Articles

Mobile Money [Online Version]

VoxDevLit Review Article.

(with Tavneet Suri, Catia Batista, Tarek Ghani, William Jack, Leora Klapper, Emma Riley, Simone Schaner, Sandip Sukhtankar)

State Capabilities Evidence Paper [Online Version]

International Growth Center.

(with Oriana Bandiera, Katherine Casey, Eliana La Ferrara, Camille Landais, and Mathieu Teachout)