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While the global economy continues to grow, ecosystem services tend to stagnate or decline. Economic theory has shown how such shifts in relative scarcities can be reflected in project appraisal and accounting, but empirical evidence has…
A significant part of the United Nations World Heritage Sites (WHSs) is located in developing countries. These sites attract an increasing number of tourist and income to these countries. Unfortunately, many of these WHSs are in a poor…
Children welfare is at the center of many welfare reforms such as cash transfers to families and training programs to parents. A key goal for policy-makers is to evaluate the costs and benefits of such reforms. The main challenge lies in…
The demand for voluntary insurance against low-probability, high-impact risks is lower than expected. To assess the magnitude of the demand, we conduct a meta-analysis of contingent valuation studies using a dataset of experimentally…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a voting paradigm for distributing a divisible resource, usually called a budget, among a set of projects by aggregating the preferences of individuals over these projects. It is implemented quite extensively…
Multilateral index numbers are often used to make claims about welfare, such as treating PPPs as cross-country costs of living or real incomes as indicators of living standards. However, such interpretations may not be consistent with the…
One of the exciting developments in the stated preference literature is the use of probabilistic stated preference experiments to estimate semi-parametric population distributions of ex ante returns and willingness-to-pay (WTP) for a choice…
A significant proportion of slum residents offer vital services that are relied upon by wealthier urban residents. However, the lack of access to clean drinking water and adequate sanitation facilities causes considerable health risks for…
Rural electrification initiatives worldwide frequently encounter financial planning challenges due to a lack of reliable market insights. This research delves into the preferences and marginal willingness to pay (mWTP) for upfront…
We study the power of item-pricing as a tool for approximately optimizing social welfare in a combinatorial market. We consider markets with $m$ indivisible items and $n$ buyers. The goal is to set prices to the items so that, when agents…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process for allocating funds to projects based on the votes of members of the community. Different rules have been used to aggregate participants' votes. Past research has studied the trade-off…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications such as travel assistance and purchasing support, they are often required to make subjective choices on behalf of users in settings where no objectively correct…
Transportation is a constitutional part of most supply and value chains in modern economies. Smallholder farmers in rural Ethiopia face severe challenges along their supply and value chains. In particular, suitable, affordable, and…
In recent years, the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) has become a popular tool for conducting cost-benefit analysis; the MVPF relies on the ratio of willingness-to-pay for a policy divided by its net fiscal cost. The MVPF gives…
We present results of an experiment benchmarking a workforce training program against cash transfers for underemployed young adults in Rwanda. 3.5 years after treatment, the training program enhances productive time use and asset…
Use of healthcare services is inadequate in Ethiopia in spite of the high burden of diseases. User-fee charges are the most important factor for this deficiency in healthcare utilization. Hence, the country is introducing community based…
This article investigates the effect of prices and socio-demographic variables on the farmers decision to purchase agricultural insurance. A survey has been conducted to 200 farmers most of whom are engaged in diversified income-generating…
We study the production, entry, and technological decisions of firms in the presence of bribery. We find that bribery can be justified even in the absence of bureaucratic inefficiencies. We document substantial technology-specific…
We use a randomized experiment to compare a workforce training program to cash transfers in Rwanda. Conducted in a sample of poor and underemployed youth, this study measures the impact of the training program not only relative to a control…
In many developing nations, a lack of poverty data prevents critical humanitarian organizations from responding to large-scale crises. Currently, socioeconomic surveys are the only method implemented on a large scale for organizations and…