KARLA HOFF is a Senior Research Economist in the Development Economics Group. Her research focuses on institutions and institutional change, particularly in the former Soviet Union and India. She has written several articles on the transition problem that address the question, will those who obtained assets at large discounts (or stole them) in the beginning of the transition become the vanguard of the rule of law, or will they be indifferent to or even actively frustrate the establishment of the rule of law? This work demonstrates how the demand for, and opposition to, the rule of law cannot be separated from macroeconomic policy, from other rules such as financial market liberalization, and from the nature of the privatization process. In her work on community formation, she explores the scope for welfare-improving policy in home-ownership and community formation. In recent work in Uttar Pradesh, India, she uses a household survey to investigate investments in education and the extent of local government capture, and conducts an experiment to test the hypothesis that a legacy of historical discrimination against low castes is to weaken the responses of low-caste individuals to economic incentives. In an experiment with 700 junior high school students, she finds evidence that the performance of low castes when they undertake a task (solving mazes) for money is debilitated by the public announcement of caste. Her co-edited book manuscript Poverty Traps brings together three strands of the literature on threshold effects, institutions, and neighborhood effects. She has also written on market responses to uncertainty and imperfect information, and on the ways that these responses may perpetuate poverty.
She has a PhD in Economics from Princeton, an MA from the Fletcher School, and a BA from Wellesley College. She was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cote d'Ivoire.
Contact Information: Karla Hoff, c/o research@worldbank.org
The author's works below are drawn from the World Bank's institutional archives.
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