Bansi Malde

Making lumpy human capital investments is difficult, particularly since returns may accrue with a significant time lag.

This paper estimates flexible child health production functions to investigate whether better water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) practices make nutrition intake more productive for children aged 6-24 months.

The low take-up of cost-effective and highly subsidised preventive health technologies in low-income countries remains a puzzle. In this paper we analyse whether, and how, micro-finance supports a large public health subsidy program in the developing world - the Swachh Bharat Mission - in achieving its aim of increasing uptake of individual household latrines.

Credit constraints are considered to be an important barrier hindering adoption of preventive health investments among low-income households in developing countries. We find labelling loans is a viable strategy to improve uptake of lumpy preventive health investments.

This paper studies the relationship between group size and informal risk sharing. It shows that under limited commitment with coalitional deviations, this relationship is theoretically ambiguous.

In many contexts we may be interested in understanding whether direct connections between agents, such as declared friendships in a classroom or family links in a rural village, affect their outcomes. In this paper, we review the literature studying econometric methods for the analysis of linear models of social effects.

Understanding whether and how connections between agents (networks) such as declared friendships in classrooms, transactions between firms, and extended family connections, influence their socio-economic outcomes has been a growing area of research within economics.

An informational intervention in Western Kenya

Community-based interventions, particularly group-based ones, are considered to be a cost-effective way of delivering interventions in low-income settings. However, design features of these programs could also influence dimensions of household and community behaviour beyond those targeted by the intervention. This paper studies spillover effects of a participatory community health intervention in rural Malawi, implemented through a cluster randomised control trial, on an outcome not directly targeted by the intervention: household consumption smoothing after crop losses.

This paper studies the effects of a randomized intervention in rural Malawi that provided mothers of young infants with information on child nutrition. The intervention improved child nutrition, household food consumption and consequently health. We find evidence that labor supply also increased.

The objective of this paper is to understand and test empirically the relationship between group size and informal risk sharing. Models of informal risk sharing with limited commitment and grim-trigger punishments upon deviation imply that larger groups provide better informal insurance.