Individuals and micro-entrepreneurs often lack su¢ cient …nancial literacy to make the complex …nancial decisions they face. We conduct a randomized control trial with a bank in the Dominican Republic to compare the impact of two distinct …nancial literacy programs. The …rst is a standard, fundamentals-based accounting training. The second is a simpli…ed, rule-of-thumb training that teaches basic heuristics to manage …nances. We …nd that only the latter produced signi…cant improvements in business practices and outcomes. The impact is especially pronounced for microentrepreneurs with poor …nancial literacy upfront. These results suggest a possible advantage to reducing the complexity of training programs.

We utilize the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (1964) mechanism to estimate the willingness to pay for clean drinking water technology in northern Ghana. The BDM mechanism has attractive properties for empirical research, allowing us to directly estimate demand, compute heterogeneous treatment effects, and study the screening and causal effects of prices with minor modifications to a standard field experiment setting. We demonstrate the implementation of BDM along these three dimensions, compare it to the standard take-it-or-leave it method for eliciting willingness to pay, and discuss practical issues for implementing the mechanism in true field settings.

Existing empirical work raises the hypothesis that performance pay—whatever its output gains—may widen the gender earnings gap because women may respond less to incentives. We evaluate this possibility by aggregating evidence from existing experiments on performance incentives with male and female subjects. Using a Bayesian hierarchical model, we estimate both the average effect and heterogeneity across studies. We find that the gender response difference is close to zero and heterogeneity across studies is small, while performance pay increases output by 0.36 standard deviations on average. The data thus support agency theory for men and women alike. (JEL C11, C90, J16, J31, J33)

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