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Publications (31)
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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– What Works and Why?
Revisiting foundational feminist work on the concept of empowerment from the 1980s and 1990s, this paper draws on the findings of a multi-country research programme, ‘Pathways of Women’s Empowerment’, to explore pathways of positive change in women’s lives, in diverse contexts, and to draw together...
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The paper attempts to examine the extent to which the ILO-supported projects have contributed to women’s economic empowerment and well-being i.e., from a gender perspective. The paper provides the ILO’s perspectives on gender dimensions of employment promotion (involving income generation and small...
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We develop the climate finance-gender equity framework in this paper and use the ‘contextual-procedural-distributive’ equity as a lens of analysis to examine how climate finance helps challenge, and reinforce, gender inequities in the mitigation, adaptation and disaster management strategies...
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This paper examines the impact of foreign aid on gender equality in education outcomes in developing countries. Heterogeneity effects by type of aid received and by type of recipients are investigated using system GMM methods. The results indicate that aggregate aid disbursements to the education...
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Agriculture is a main contributor to pro-poor growth in Africa, but gender inequalities in the sector hold back agricultural growth and affect household welfare negatively. The sector has been characterized by a lack of gender-disaggregated data and patchy gender-integration in policies and...
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– A Panel Analysis of Aid for Education
The aid allocation literature has neglected gender-specific needs for aid. We assess the hypothesis that gender inequality in education is more likely to affect the aid allocation of donor countries with female leadership in the relevant ministry. We find no evidence for a needs-based allocation of...
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– A Return to Instrumentalism in Development Policy and Practice?
There has been a significant increase in funding for health programmes in development over the last two decades, partly due to the formation of public-private partnerships. This paper examines the impact of public-private partnerships from the perspective of women’s health, and asks whether the...
Displaying 16 of 31 results