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Publications (19)
Working Paper
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While the short-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on lives and livelihoods are well understood, we know little about the effect of the pandemic for longer-term outcomes such as corruption. We look at the historical data on political and economic crises to assess what we can learn from the long...
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– Evidence from a field experiment in India
Does information dissemination among beneficiaries of welfare programmes mitigate their implementation failures? We present experimental evidence in the context of a rural public works programme in India, where we assess the impact of an intervention that involves dissemination of publicly available...
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While the effects of corruption on bilateral trade have been relatively well explored, its effect on the composition of trading partners has not been studied. In this paper, we argue that corruption in a country is likely to impose asymmetric costs on its trading partners depending on their...
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– Assessing the relative effectiveness of egalitarian governance and healthcare system capacity on the COVID-19 pandemic
Scholars of public health typically focus on societal equity for explaining public health outcomes. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a spate of studies showing a tight connection between inequitable access to healthcare, welfare services, and adverse outcomes from the pandemic. Others have...
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– An investigation of India’s employment guarantee programme
Administrative failures in anti-poverty programmes are widespread in developing countries.We focus on one such administrative failure—the persistent delay in paying beneficiaries on time in India’s iconic anti-poverty programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Using a life cycle...
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– Theory and evidence from India
What motivates individuals to become politicians? This is an important question in decentralized democracies, where local politicians play a key role in public goods provision. However, and in emerging economies, bureaucratic hurdles and administrative failures introduce uncertainty about the...
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– The doubly false premise of rules reform
The World Bank’s Doing Business reports have evoked an intense policy debate about whether countries should simplify regulatory rules in order to stimulate investment and growth, or make them more stringent in order to achieve public policy objectives. Both sides of this debate, however, assume that...
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– Do political institutions matter?
Corruption is widely believed to negatively affect economic growth. However, many East and Southeast Asia countries either achieved or currently are achieving impressively rapid economic growth despite widespread corruption — the ‘East Asian Paradox’. Is this negative relationship equally likely to...
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– Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment in India
In emerging economies, pro-social policy outcomes may be prevented by bureaucratic inefficiency, capture by elected or non-elected office holders, or by other hurdles. For local citizens, uncertainty about the true cause of such failures often prevails. We study the pro-sociality of politicians’...
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– A New Perspective on the Transmission of HIV/AIDS
Public policy debates, about HIV and prevention policy, have tended to occupy one of two extreme positions derived from either rational choice and or structuralists theories. This paper argues that the concept of hope may offer a way through this policy and paradigmatic log-jam. Hope is an...
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The paucity of non-agricultural paid employment, and under utilization of female labour in Uganda, and other sub-Saharan African countries, is often seen to be the next major obstacle to further poverty reduction and development in the region. Despite this there have been few empirical...
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– The Contest for Aid
Countries compete with one another for funds distributed by nongovernment organizations (NGOs). We examine the competition over poverty and governance conducted by a NGO in the allocation of its funds among potential recipient countries. The NGO in its decisionmaking process also takes into account...
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– Impact Pathways and Recent Evidence
The last two decades of the twentieth century recorded a slowdown in health gains and widespread increases in health inequality across and within countries. The paper explores the causes of such trends on the basis of five main mortality models. To do so, it regresses IMR/LEB on 15 determinants of...
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– Evidence from Mexico
This paper uses a subjective wellbeing approach to study the role of household arrangements on the health satisfaction of an individual. It also studies the impact of household arrangements on health satisfaction across different income groups, by contrasting two main theories of the family: the...
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– A Quantile Regression Approach
Reducing child malnutrition is a key goal of most developing countries. To combat child malnutrition with the right set of interventions, policymakers need to have a better understanding of its economic, social and policy determinants. While there is a large literature that investigates the...
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The reduction of child mortality is one of the most universally accepted Millennium Goals. However, there is a significant debate on the means of reaching it and its realism with regard to the situation in most of the least developed countries. The recommendations made for the achievement of this...
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