To understand altruistic behavior, we must understand the process through which altruism develops and is shaped by the agents' own choices and exogenous factors. We introduce the concept of altruistic capital, which grows with effort devoted to altruistic acts and facilitates future altruism. We illustrate its potential use in the context of banking and conclude by showing that returns to altruistic effort shape the agent's choices and are shaped by external events such as the financial crisis.

We embed a field experiment in a nationwide recruitment drive for a new health care position in Zambia to test whether career benefits attract talent at the expense of prosocial motivation. In line with common wisdom, offering career opportunities attracts less prosocial applicants. However, the trade-off exists only at low levels of talent; the marginal applicants in treatment are more talented and equally prosocial. These are hired, and perform better at every step of the causal chain: they provide more inputs, increase facility utilization, and improve health outcomes including a 25 percent decrease in child malnutrition.

Maternal mortality remains very high in many parts of the developing world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. While maternal deaths are observable, it may not be straightforward for individuals to learn about risk factors. This paper utilizes novel data on male and female perceptions of maternal risk in Zambia to document that superstitions about causes of maternal mortality are pervasive and to uncover evidence that such beliefs impede learning about maternal health risk levels and correlates. In our data, people who hold traditional beliefs disregard past birth complications completely in assessing future risk, unlike those who hold modern beliefs.

We posit that household decision-making over fertility is characterized by moral hazard since most contraception can only be perfectly observed by the woman. Using an experiment in Zambia that varied whether women were given access to contraceptives alone or with their husbands, we find that women given access with their husbands were 19 percent less likely to seek family planning services, 25 percent less likely to use concealable contraception, and 27 percent more likely to give birth. However, women given access to contraception alone report a lower subjective well-being, suggesting a psychosocial cost of making contraceptives more concealable.

Expensive infrastructure is ineffective if it doesn't travel the last mile. In nineteenth-century New York and modern Africa, disease has spread when urbanites chose not to use newly built sanitation infrastructure to save money. Either subsidies or Pigouvian fines can internalize the externalities that occur when people don't use sanitation infrastructure, but with weak institutions subsidies generate waste and fines lead to extortion. Our model illustrates the complementarity between infrastructure and institutions and shows how institutional weaknesses determine whether fines, subsidies, both or neither are optimal. Contrary to Becker (1968), the optimal fine is often mild to reduce extortion.

We implemented a randomized field experiment that tested ways to stimulate migrants’ savings in their origin country. We find that migrants value opportunities to exert greater control over financial activities in their home countries. We offered U.S.-based migrants bank accounts in El Salvador, randomly varying migrant control over El Salvador–based savings by offering different accounts across treatments. Migrants offered the greatest degree of control accumulated the most savings. Impacts likely represent increases in total savings; there is no evidence that savings increases were simply reallocated from other savings mechanisms. Enhanced control over home country savings does not affect remittances sent home.