Abhijit Banerjee
Biographic Data
| ID | 3591508 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Abhijit Banerjee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Abhijit |
| FAMILY NAME | Banerjee |
| SIGNATURE | BANERJEE A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9923-6088 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 759 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Can a Trusted Messenger Change Behavior When Information Is Plentiful? Evidence from the First Months of the Covid-19 Pandemic in West Bengal
Can information from a credible messenger shift behavior in an information-saturated environment? In a randomized controlled trial involving twenty-eight million individuals in West Bengal, we find that SMS-delivered video messages containing information about COVID-19 symptoms and health-preserving behaviors recorded by a credible messenger increased adherence to targeted and non-targeted preventive behaviors, measured by two objective measures …
How important are matching frictions in the labor market? Experimental & non-experimental evidence from a large Indian firm
Better strategies for saving more: Evidence from three interventions in Chile
Consensus and Disagreement: Information Aggregation under (Not So) Naive Learning
International audience
Learning by searching: Spatial mismatches and imperfect information in Southern labor markets
Youth unemployment remains extremely high throughout the developing world, at times coexisting with unmet demand for labor and high job turnover. We examine one possible explanation for this: spatial mismatches between jobs and job-seekers combined with high search costs can lead young job-seekers to have overly optimistic beliefs about their employment prospects. As a result, job-seekers under-search but also hold out for better jobs. Through a …
Depression and Loneliness among the Elderly in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
We combine data from longitudinal surveys in seven low- and middle-income countries (plus the United States for comparison) to document that depressive symptoms among those aged 55 and above are prevalent in those countries and, unlike in the United States, increase sharply with age. Depressive symptoms in one survey wave are associated with a greater decline in ability to carry out basic daily activities and a higher probability of death in the …
Consensus and Disagreement: Information Aggregation under (not so) Naive Learning
We explore a model of non-Bayesian information aggregation in networks.Agents noncooperatively choose among Friedkin-Johnsen type aggregation rules to maximize payoffs.The DeGroot rule is chosen in equilibrium if and only if there is noiseless information transmission, leading to consensus.With noisy transmission, while some disagreement is inevitable, the optimal choice of rule amplifies the disagreement: even with little noise, individuals plac…
XSS filter evasion using reinforcement learning to assist cross-site scripting testing
Machine learning and deep learning are widely utilized and highly effective in attack classifiers. Little research has been undertaken on detecting and protecting cross-site scripting, leaving artificial intelligence systems susceptible to adversarial assaults (XSS). It is crucial to develop a mechanism for increasing the algorithm's resilience to assault. This study intends to utilize reinforcement learning to enhance XSS detection and adversari…
Doctors' and Nurses' Social Media Ads Reduced Holiday Travel and Covid-19 Infections: A Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial
We thank the health team at Facebook for their in-kind financial
Unpacking a multi-faceted program to build sustainable income for the very poor
Naïve Learning with Uninformed Agents
The DeGroot model has emerged as a credible alternative to the standard Bayesian model for studying learning on networks, offering a natural way to model naïve learning in a complex setting. One unattractive aspect of this model is the assumption that the process starts with every node in the network having a signal. We study a natural extension of the DeGroot model that can deal with sparse initial signals. We show that an agent’s social influen…
Économie utile pour des temps difficiles
Les auteurs analysent les grands problèmes contemporains, tels que l'immigration, le libre-échange, la croissance, les inégalités et le changement climatique, afin de déconstruire les fausses évidences et les conclusions trop rapides, discutant les affirmations de la pensée économique comme les arguments des discours populistes. Ils proposent des alternatives pour bâtir un monde plus juste. ©Electre 2020
On the road: Access to transportation infrastructure and economic growth in China
How Much do Existing Borrowers Value Microfinance? Evidence from an Experiment on Bundling Microcredit and Insurance
Randomized controlled trials have found only modest effects of microfinance, but these studies focus on new clients. Existing estimates may thus understate ongoing gains for more experienced borrowers and the longer‐run potential of microfinance. We estimate impacts of microfinance on experienced borrowers, using an episode when a microfinance institution modestly increased existing clients’ fees in randomly selected villages (in exchange for a m…
Handbook of Economic Field Experiments
Can iron-fortified salt control anemia? Evidence from two experiments in rural Bihar
Tangible Information and Citizen Empowerment: Identification Cards and Food Subsidy Programs in Indonesia
Redistribution programs in developing countries often "leak" because local officials do not implement programs as the central government intends. We study one approach to reducing leakage. In an experiment in over 550 villages, we test whether mailing cards with program information to targeted beneficiaries increases the subsidy they receive from a subsidized rice program. On net, beneficiaries received 26 percent more subsidy in card villages. I…
From Proof of Concept to Scalable Policies: Challenges and Solutions, with an Application
The promise of randomized controlled trials is that evidence gathered through the evaluation of a specific program helps us-possibly after several rounds of fine-tuning and multiple replications in different contexts-to inform policy. However, critics have pointed out that a potential constraint in this agenda is that results from small "proof-of-concept" studies run by nongovernment organizations may not apply to policies that can be implemented…
Self-Targeting: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia
This paper shows that adding a small application cost to a transfer program can substantially improve targeting through self-selection. Our village-level experiment in Indonesia finds that requiring beneficiaries to apply for benefits results in substantially poorer beneficiaries than automatic enrollment using the same asset test. Marginally increasing application costs on an experimental basis does not further improve targeting. Estimating a mo…
The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation
This paper reports results from the randomized evaluation of a group-lending microcredit program in Hyderabad, India. A lender worked in 52 randomly selected neighborhoods, leading to an 8.4 percentage point increase in takeup of microcredit. Small business investment and profits of preexisting businesses increased, but consumption did not significantly increase. Durable goods expenditure increased, while “temptation goods” expenditure declined. …
Six Randomized Evaluations of Microcredit: Introduction and Further Steps
Causal evidence on microcredit impacts informs theory, practice, and debates about its effectiveness as a development tool. The six randomized evaluations in this volume use a variety of sampling, data collection, experimental design, and econometric strategies to identify causal effects of expanded access to microcredit on borrowers and/or communities. These methods are deployed across an impressive range of locations—six countries on four conti…
Do Firms Want to Borrow More? Testing Credit Constraints Using a Directed Lending Program
This article uses variation in access to a targeted lending program to estimate whether firms are credit constrained. While both constrained and unconstrained firms may be willing to absorb all the directed credit that they can get (because it may be cheaper than other sources of credit), constrained firms will use it to expand production, while unconstrained firms will primarily use it as a substitute for other borrowing. We apply these observat…
Are Poor Voters Indifferent to Whether Elected Leaders Are Criminal or Corrupt? A Vignette Experiment in Rural India
Although in theory elections are supposed to prevent criminal or venal candidates from winning or retaining office, in practice voters frequently elect and reelect such candidates. This surprising pattern is sometimes explained by reference to voters' underlying preferences, which are thought to favor criminal or corrupt candidates because of the patronage they provide. This article tests this hypothesis using 2010 data from the Indian state of U…
Microcredit Under the Microscope: What Have We Learned in the Past Two Decades, and What Do We Need to Know?
Research on microcredit is now two decades old. There has been enormous progress in understanding both what microcredit does and how. Yet a lot of what we have learned has raised new and often quite fundamental questions about its nature: Is microcredit primarily about investment, consumption, or savings? Why is it that the investments financed by microcredit do not always lead to income growth, and does this have to do with the structure of micr…
The Diffusion of Microfinance
Introduction How do the network positions of the first individuals in a society to receive information about a new product affect its eventual diffusion? To answer this question, we develop a model of information diffusion through a social network that discriminates between information passing (individuals must be aware of the product before they can adopt it, and they can learn from their friends) and endorsement (the decisions of informed indiv…
Occupational Choice and the Process of Development
This paper models economic development as a process of institutional transformation by focusing on the interplay between agents' occupational decisions and the distribution of wealth. Becau se of capital-market imperfections, poor agents choose working for a wa ge over self-employment and wealthy agents become entrepreneurs who monitor workers. Only with sufficient inequality, however, will ther e be employment contracts; otherwise, there is eith…
The Economic Lives of the Poor
The 1990 World Development Report from the World Bank defined the "extremely poor" people of the world as those who are currently living on no more than $1 per day per person. But how actually does one live on less than $1 per day? This essay is about the economic lives of the extremely poor: the choices they face, the constraints they grapple with, and the challenges they meet. A number of recent data sets and a body of new research allow us to …
Empowerment and Efficiency: Tenancy Reform in West Bengal
The paper analyzes the effect of agricultural tenancy laws offering security of tenure to tenants and regulating the share of output that is paid as rent on farm productivity. Theoretically, the net impact of tenancy reform is shown to be a combination of two effects: a bargaining power effect and a security of tenure effect. Analysis of evidence on how contracts and productivity changed after a tenancy reform program was implemented in the India…
The political economy of public goods: Some evidence from India
On the road: Access to transportation infrastructure and economic growth in China
Are Poor Voters Indifferent to Whether Elected Leaders Are Criminal or Corrupt? A Vignette Experiment in Rural India
Although in theory elections are supposed to prevent criminal or venal candidates from winning or retaining office, in practice voters frequently elect and reelect such candidates. This surprising pattern is sometimes explained by reference to voters' underlying preferences, which are thought to favor criminal or corrupt candidates because of the patronage they provide. This article tests this hypothesis using 2010 data from the Indian state of U…
Inequality, Control Rights, and Rent Seeking: Sugar Cooperatives in Maharashtra
This paper presents a theory of rent seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members. The two key assumptions are constraints on lump-sum transfers from poorer members and disproportionate control rights wielded by wealthier members. Transfers of rents to the latter are achieved by depressing prices paid for inputs supplied by members and diverting resulting …
Self-Targeting: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia
This paper shows that adding a small application cost to a transfer program can substantially improve targeting through self-selection. Our village-level experiment in Indonesia finds that requiring beneficiaries to apply for benefits results in substantially poorer beneficiaries than automatic enrollment using the same asset test. Marginally increasing application costs on an experimental basis does not further improve targeting. Estimating a mo…
Tangible Information and Citizen Empowerment: Identification Cards and Food Subsidy Programs in Indonesia
Redistribution programs in developing countries often "leak" because local officials do not implement programs as the central government intends. We study one approach to reducing leakage. In an experiment in over 550 villages, we test whether mailing cards with program information to targeted beneficiaries increases the subsidy they receive from a subsidized rice program. On net, beneficiaries received 26 percent more subsidy in card villages. I…
From Proof of Concept to Scalable Policies: Challenges and Solutions, with an Application
The promise of randomized controlled trials is that evidence gathered through the evaluation of a specific program helps us-possibly after several rounds of fine-tuning and multiple replications in different contexts-to inform policy. However, critics have pointed out that a potential constraint in this agenda is that results from small "proof-of-concept" studies run by nongovernment organizations may not apply to policies that can be implemented…
Can iron-fortified salt control anemia? Evidence from two experiments in rural Bihar
Addressing Absence
Absent providers are a major problem both for public health facilities and primary schools in many developing countries. For example, in India, absence rates for teachers are over 24 percent, and for health providers they are over 40 percent. This paper presents evidence on a number of innovative strategies to reduce absenteeism in government- and nongovernmental organization-run schools and health facilities. These strategies were implemented in…
History, Social Divisions, and Public Goods in Rural India
Learning by searching: Spatial mismatches and imperfect information in Southern labor markets
Youth unemployment remains extremely high throughout the developing world, at times coexisting with unmet demand for labor and high job turnover. We examine one possible explanation for this: spatial mismatches between jobs and job-seekers combined with high search costs can lead young job-seekers to have overly optimistic beliefs about their employment prospects. As a result, job-seekers under-search but also hold out for better jobs. Through a …
Eviction threats and investment incentives
Educational policy and the economics of the family
Unpacking a multi-faceted program to build sustainable income for the very poor
Depression and Loneliness among the Elderly in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
We combine data from longitudinal surveys in seven low- and middle-income countries (plus the United States for comparison) to document that depressive symptoms among those aged 55 and above are prevalent in those countries and, unlike in the United States, increase sharply with age. Depressive symptoms in one survey wave are associated with a greater decline in ability to carry out basic daily activities and a higher probability of death in the …
Naïve Learning with Uninformed Agents
The DeGroot model has emerged as a credible alternative to the standard Bayesian model for studying learning on networks, offering a natural way to model naïve learning in a complex setting. One unattractive aspect of this model is the assumption that the process starts with every node in the network having a signal. We study a natural extension of the DeGroot model that can deal with sparse initial signals. We show that an agent’s social influen…
A Simple Model of Herd Behavior
We analyze a sequential decision model in which each decision maker looks at the decisions made by previous decision makers in taking her own decision. This is rational for her because these other decision makers may have some information that is important for her. We then show that the decision rules that are chosen by optimizing individuals will be characterized by herd behavior; i.e., people will be doing what others are doing rather than usin…
Occupational Choice and the Process of Development
This paper models economic development as a process of institutional transformation by focusing on the interplay between agents' occupational decisions and the distribution of wealth. Becau se of capital-market imperfections, poor agents choose working for a wa ge over self-employment and wealthy agents become entrepreneurs who monitor workers. Only with sufficient inequality, however, will ther e be employment contracts; otherwise, there is eith…
Thy Neighbor's Keeper: The Design of a Credit Cooperative with Theory and a Test
Economists now appreciate that resource allocation in less economically developed economies is profoundly influenced by nonfirm economic institutions. However, our theories of nonfirm institutions often suggest different answers to many questions including those of policy. This paper illustrates a method for discriminating between alternative theories using data from German credit cooperatives from nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany. …
A Theory of Misgovernance
This paper tries to explain why government bureaucracies are often associated with red tape, corruption, and lack of incentives. The paper identifies two specific ingredients that together can provide an explanation: the fact that governments often act precisely in situations where markets fail and the presence of agency problems within the government. We show that these problems are exacerbated at low levels of development and in bureaucracies d…
Inequality, Control Rights, and Rent Seeking: Sugar Cooperatives in Maharashtra
This paper presents a theory of rent seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members. The two key assumptions are constraints on lump-sum transfers from poorer members and disproportionate control rights wielded by wealthier members. Transfers of rents to the latter are achieved by depressing prices paid for inputs supplied by members and diverting resulting …
Empowerment and Efficiency: Tenancy Reform in West Bengal
The paper analyzes the effect of agricultural tenancy laws offering security of tenure to tenants and regulating the share of output that is paid as rent on farm productivity. Theoretically, the net impact of tenancy reform is shown to be a combination of two effects: a bargaining power effect and a security of tenure effect. Analysis of evidence on how contracts and productivity changed after a tenancy reform program was implemented in the India…
A corporate balance-sheet approach to currency crises
Wealth, Health, and Health Services in Rural Rajasthan
What are the determinants of health and of well-being? Income and wealth are clearly part of the story, but does access to health care have a large independent effect, as the advocates of more investment in health care, such as the World Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, 2001), have argued? This paper reports on a recent survey in a poor rural area of the state of Rajasthan in …
Eviction threats and investment incentives
Educational policy and the economics of the family
History, Social Divisions, and Public Goods in Rural India
We examine the influence of three historically important sources of social divisions on the availability of public goods in rural India: colonial power, landowner-peasant relations as determined by the land tenure system and social fragmentation based on the Hindu caste system and the presence of sizable religious minorities. Using data on public goods from 1991, we find that regions that were under British colonial power in the pre-independence …
History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India
We analyze the colonial land revenue institutions set up by the British in India, and show that differences in historical property rights institutions lead to sustained differences in economic outcomes. Areas in which proprietary rights in land were historically given to landlords have significantly lower agricultural investments and productivity in the post-independence period than areas in which these rights were given to the cultivators. These…
History, Social Divisions, and Public Goods in Rural India
Understanding Poverty
This volume presents 28 essays on poverty by some of the leading experts in the field of economics. The book is divided into three sections, beginning with an essay about how poverty is measured. The first section is about the causes of poverty and its persistence, and the ideas range from the impact of colonialism and globalization to the problems of “excessive” population growth, corruption, and ethnic conflict. The second section is about poli…
The political economy of public goods: Some evidence from India
Addressing Absence
Absent providers are a major problem both for public health facilities and primary schools in many developing countries. For example, in India, absence rates for teachers are over 24 percent, and for health providers they are over 40 percent. This paper presents evidence on a number of innovative strategies to reduce absenteeism in government- and nongovernmental organization-run schools and health facilities. These strategies were implemented in…
Remedying Education: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments in India
This paper presents the results of two randomized experiments conducted in schools in urban India. A remedial education program hired young women to teach students lagging behind in basic literacy and numeracy skills. It increased average test scores of all children in treatment schools by 0.28 standard deviation, mostly due to large gains experienced by children at the bottom of the test-score distribution. A computer-assisted learning program f…
The Economic Lives of the Poor
The 1990 World Development Report from the World Bank defined the "extremely poor" people of the world as those who are currently living on no more than $1 per day per person. But how actually does one live on less than $1 per day? This essay is about the economic lives of the extremely poor: the choices they face, the constraints they grapple with, and the challenges they meet. A number of recent data sets and a body of new research allow us to …
Labor market discrimination in Delhi: Evidence from a field experiment
Improving immunisation coverage in rural India: Clustered randomised controlled evaluation of immunisation campaigns with and without incentives
OBJECTIVE: To assess the efficacy of modest non-financial incentives on immunisation rates in children aged 1-3 and to compare it with the effect of only improving the reliability of the supply of services. DESIGN: Clustered randomised controlled study. SETTING: Rural Rajasthan, India. PARTICIPANTS: 1640 children aged 1-3 at end point. INTERVENTIONS: 134 villages were randomised to one of three groups: a once monthly reliable immunisation camp (i…
Long-Run Health Impacts of Income Shocks: Wine and Phylloxera in Nineteenth-Century France
Between 1863 and 1890, phylloxera destroyed 40% of French vineyards. Using the regional variation in the timing of this shock, we identify and examine the effects on adult height, health, and life expectancy of children born in the years and regions affected by the phylloxera. The shock decreased long-run height, but it did not affect other dimensions of health, including life expectancy. We find that those born in affected regions were about 1.8…
Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia
This paper reports an experiment in 640 Indonesian villages on three approaches to target the poor: proxy means tests (PMT), where assets are used to predict consumption; community targeting, where villagers rank everyone from richest to poorest; and a hybrid. Defining poverty based on PPP$2 per capita consumption, community targeting and the hybrid perform somewhat worse in identifying the poor than PMT, though not by enough to significantly aff…
Microcredit Under the Microscope: What Have We Learned in the Past Two Decades, and What Do We Need to Know?
Research on microcredit is now two decades old. There has been enormous progress in understanding both what microcredit does and how. Yet a lot of what we have learned has raised new and often quite fundamental questions about its nature: Is microcredit primarily about investment, consumption, or savings? Why is it that the investments financed by microcredit do not always lead to income growth, and does this have to do with the structure of micr…
The Diffusion of Microfinance
Introduction How do the network positions of the first individuals in a society to receive information about a new product affect its eventual diffusion? To answer this question, we develop a model of information diffusion through a social network that discriminates between information passing (individuals must be aware of the product before they can adopt it, and they can learn from their friends) and endorsement (the decisions of informed indiv…
Response to ‘A Re-Examination of Banerjee and Iyer’ by Iversen, Palmer-Jones and Sen
Iversen, Palmer-Jones and Sen (2013, henceforth IPS) re-examine our paper (Banerjee & Iyer, 2005, henceforth BI) on the effects of historical land tenure systems on long-run economic development ac
Economics (38 works) · Economic growth (19 works) · Business (18 works) · Political science (18 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Medicine (11 works) · Microfinance and Financial Inclusion (11 works) · Development economics (9 works) · Microeconomics (9 works)