This article reviews the literature on aspirations in economics, with a particular focus on
socially determined aspirations. The core theory builds on two fundamental principles:(a) …

Increasing agricultural productivity while ensuring environmental sustainability are two
important targets in achieving the sustainable development goals under climatic shocks. In …

The occupation aspirations of adolescents play an important role in their human capital
investment decisions. This paper provides new empirical evidence of a non-linear …

Cross‐country studies reveal two consistent gender gaps in education—underachievement
in school by boys and low rates of participation in STEM studies by girls. Recent economics …

We investigate the relationship between aspirations, risk preferences, and investment in
agricultural technologies using data collected among cacao farmers in Ecuador. We first find …

A randomized experiment among poor entrepreneurs tested the impact of exogenously
inducing higher financial aspirations. In theory, raising aspirations could have positive …

Aspirations bring different versions of the future into the present. This introductory essay
asks what we can learn by attending to the myriad ways in which rural subjects and …

How do aspirations influence investment decisions for people living in poverty? Does this
change as peoples economic conditions improve? To answer these questions, we design a …

This paper analyses the short-term impacts of a large scale conditional cash transfer
program on educational aspirations in poor households. Using data from the impact …

The aspirations gap is the distance between an individual's current and aspired standard of
livelihood. A growing theoretical literature predicts that aspirations both “too close” and “too …