SITE Working Paper Series,
Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics

Abstract: High coordination costs are often blamed for the low quality of public goods available to the poor. Participatory development programs have sought to lower these costs by improving trust and cooperation, but the evidence of their impact is mixed. We examine financial “self-help” groups in one of the poorest districts in India, using a unique combination of a village-randomized controlled trial and a lab-in-the-field experiment. A survey of 1,600 women before and after the intervention shows that the presence of these groups improved access to, and quality of, a critical local public good: water. Public goods games played with 184 participants in a subset of control and treatment villages indicate that cooperative norms are stronger where self-help groups were present. We find little evidence that membership leads to a convergence of tastes among group members. These results suggest that, in contrast to traditional community initiatives, self-help groups can build durable social capital in poor communities.

Keywords: self-help groups; RCT; lab-in-the-field; public goods games; India

JEL-codes: F63; J16; O12; O17

86 pages, November 4, 2016

Full text files

hasite0040.pdf  Full text

Download statistics

• Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics
• Ordering Working Papers
• Instructions for Authors
• Home page for this series

Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Dominick Nilsson ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().

This page generated on 2024-02-05 17:11:26.