Social Network Capital, Economic Mobility and Poverty Traps

The paper explores the role social network capital might play in facilitating poor agents’ escape from poverty traps. We model endogenous network formation among households heterogeneously endowed with both traditional and social network capital who make investment and technology choices over time in the absence of financial markets and faced with multiple production technologies featuring different fixed costs and returns. We show that social network capital can serve as either a complement to or a substitute for productive assets in facilitating some poor households’ escape from poverty. However, the voluntary nature of costly social network formation also creates both involuntary and voluntary exclusionary mechanisms that impede some poor households’ efforts to exit poverty. The ameliorative potential of social networks therefore depends fundamentally on the underlying wealth distribution in the economy. In some settings, targeted public transfers to the poor can crowd-in private resources by inducing new social links that the poor can exploit to escape from poverty

Reducing Corruption in Public Education Programs in Africa: Instruments and Capture in Madagascar

This paper investigates how the choice of public expenditure instrument is affecting capture in the public education sector. We analyze data on two public funding schemes in Madagascar. We find that there is much more capture of in-kind transfers than of cash transfers. Capture of both instruments declines with better local access to media infirmation and with higher local literacy rates. However, capture of cash grants falls rapidly with a raise in the level of education of the intended beneficiaries, while this effect is significantly weaker for capture of in-kind funds. Our findings suggest that intensive monitoring and increased public access to infirmation should be combined with the right instrument for public funding implementation in order to eradicate capture and corruption