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For further information about this series and for press inquiries please contact Lubala Chibwe, by email: l.chibwe@lse.ac.uk.
Timothy Besley, Rohini Pande and Vijayendra Rao
This paper uses data on elected village councils in South India to examine the political economy of public resource allocation. We find that the pattern of policy-making reflects politicians' self-interest. Elected counc...Read more...
October 2007
Timothy Besley and Masayuki Kudamatsu
One of the key goals of political economy is to understand how institutional arrangements shape policy outcomes. This paper studies a comparatively neglected aspect of this - the forces that shape heterogeneous performan...Read more...
May 2007
Jean-Paul Faguet and Fabio Sanchez
The effects of decentralization on public sector outputs is much debated but little agreed upon. This paper compares the remarkable case of Bolivia with the more complex case of Colombia to explore decentralization’s eff...Read more...
March 2006
Justina A.V. Fischer and Benno Torgler
Research evidence on the impact of relative income position on individual attitudes and behaviour is sorely lacking. Therefore, this paper assesses such positional impact on social capital by applying 14 different measur...Read more...
February 2006
Philippe Aghion, Robin Burgess, Stephen J. Redding and Fabrizio Zilibotti
This paper investigates whether the effects, on registered manufacturing out-put, employment, entry and investment, of dismantling the ‘license raj’ - a system of central controls regulating entry and production activity...Read more...
December 2005
This paper uses household data from India to examine the economic and social status of village politicians, and how individual and village characteristics a®ect politician behavior while in o±ce. Education increases the ...Read more...
August 2005
Jean-Paul Faguet
With strong conceptual arguments in its favor, decentralization is a popular and growing policy trend across the world. And yet dozens of empirical studies have failed to find convincing evidence that past reforms have w...Read more...
June 2004
Berta Esteve-Volart
Gender inequality is an acute and persistent problem, especially in developing countries. This paper argues that gender discrimination is an inefficient practice. We model gender discrimination as the complete exclusion ...Read more...
January 2004
Cecilia Testa
This paper studies the impact of the competition between lobbies and voters on policy outcomes under alternative legislative procedures. Lobbies and citizens have opposing interests in a public policy and offer money and...Read more...
November 2003
Robin Burgess and Rohini Pande
Lack of access to finance is often cited as a key reason why poor people remain poor. This paper uses data on the Indian rural branch expansion program to provide empirial evidence on this issue. Between 1977 and 1990, t...Read more...
August 2003
Abhijit Banerjee and Maitreesh Ghatak
We show that the effect of eviction threats on unobservable investment effort can be positive. We demonstrate this apparently counter-intuitive result in a model of tenancy where investment by a tenant in the current per...Read more...
June 2003
Markus Goldstein
I test a model of Pareto efficient risk sharing within households using consumption data from Ghana. The results reject this model despite showing that individual consumption is not significantly affected by both agricul...Read more...
David Stasavage
While it is generally recognized that electoral competition can have a major influence on public spending decisions, there has been little effort to consider whether the move to multiparty elections in African countries ...Read more...
February 2003
Robert MacCulloch and Silvia Pezzini
A fundamental issue for economists is what determines civil conflict. One unsettled question is the relative importance of political freedoms versus economic development. This paper takes a new approach to provide an ans...Read more...
September 2002
Oriana Bandiera and Imran Rasul
Despite their potentially strong impact on poverty, agricultural innovations are often adopted slowly. Using a unique household dataset on sunflower adoption in Mozambique, we analyse whether and how individual adoption ...Read more...
June 2002
Oriana Bandiera
Does the distribution of land rights affect the choice of contractible techniques? I present evidence suggesting that Nicaraguan farmers are more likely to grow effort-intensive crops on owned rather than on rented plots...Read more...
April 2002
Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess
This paper investigates whether the industrial relations climate in Indian States has affected the pattern of manufacturing growth in the period 1958-92. We show that pro-worker amendments to the Industrial Disputes Act ...Read more...
February 2002
Markus Goldstein, Elisabeth Sadoulet and Alain de Janvry
Mutual insurance has been shown, theoretically and empirically, to be incomplete and limited by asymmetric information and lack of enforcement mechanisms. While some research has shown that networks based on kinship, nei...Read more...
Robert MacCulloch
This paper develops a simple model to show how social insurance affects the desire to revolt against property rights. It then tests for the effect of social insurance on revolt by introducing a panel data set derived fro...Read more...
September 2001
Although property rights are the cornerstone of capitalist economics, throughout history existing claims have been frequently overturned and redefined by revolution. A fundamental question for economists is what makes re...Read more...
Robin Burgess and Juzhong Zhuang
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December 2000
Gaps in welfare attainment between boys and girls in China have attracted international attention. In this paper demand analysis is used to try and uncover the factors which may be driving the emergence of the gender gap...Read more...
David Coady and Jean Drèze
Commodity taxes have three distinct roles: (1) revenue collection, (2) interpersonal redistribution, and (3) resource allocation. The paper presents an integrated treatment of these three concerns in a second-best genera...Read more...
September 2000
Sonia R Bhalotra
This paper investigates why children work by studying the wage elasticity of child labour supply. Incorporating subsistence constraints in to a model of labour supply, we show that a negative wage elasticity favours the ...Read more...
August 2000
Recent theoretical and empirical work has demonstrated a clear negative link between macroeconomic and political uncertainty and levels of private investment across countries. This result raises the question what institu...Read more...
July 2000
Sonia R Bhalotra and Chris Heady
This paper presents a dynamic model of child labour supply in a farming household. The model clarifies the roles of land, income and household size, allowing labour and credit market imperfections. If labour markets are ...Read more...
Kiminori Matsuyama
This paper develops a model to understand mechanisms behind the rise of mass consumption societies. The development process depicted in the model follows the Flying Geese pattern, in which a series of industries takes of...Read more...
November 2000
Partha Dasgupta
This paper is about measuring social well-being and evaluating policy. Part I is concerned with the links between the two, while Parts II and III, respectively, are devoted to the development of appropriate methods of me...Read more...
June 2000
Luis Carranza and Jose E. Galdon-Sanchez
In this paper we have built a model of financial intermediation that explains the GDP variability pattern of an economy during the development process. In our model, per capita is more volatile in the middle-income econo...Read more...
March 2000
Jean Drèze and Mamta Murthi
There has been a significant decline in fertility in many parts of India since the early 1980s. This paper reexamines the determinants of fertility levels and fertility decline, using panel data on Indian districts for 1...Read more...
January 2000
This paper analyses the empirical determinants of contract length, a key and yet neglected dimension of contractual structure. I use data on tenancy agreements signed between 1870 and 1880 in the district of Siracusa, It...Read more...
Jean Drèze and Geeta Gandhi Kingdon
This paper presents an analysis of the determinant of school participation in rural north India, based on a recent household survey which includes detailed information on school characteristics. School participation espe...Read more...
August 1999
Timothy Besley and Maitreesh Ghatak
This paper analyzes the role of public and private responsibility in the provision of public goods. We emphasise that a typical public good will require many different inputs which raises the possibility of partnerships ...Read more...
Rohini Pande
Disadvantaged groups tend also to constitute population minorities. One consequence of this is that the policies implemented by electorally accountable governments often fail to reflect minority interests. A policy solut...Read more...
June 1999
R. Hopkins and C.D. Scott
The purpose of this paper is to identify the organisational comparative advantage of NGOs, and to develop a model which explains the set of circumstances uder which they emerge and dominate other types of firms. It is ar...Read more...
May 1999
Edward Miguel
This paper explores the relationship between ethnic diversity and local school funding in Kenyan primary schools. The empirical results paint a picture of pervasive local collective action problems in ethnically diverse ...Read more...
In recent times there has been a renewed interest in relationships between redistribution, growth and welfare. Land reforms have been central to strategies to improve the asset base of the poor in developing countries th...Read more...
October 1998
Partha Dasgupta and Karl-Goran Maler
This paper is about net national product (NNP). We are concerned with what NNP means, what it should include, what it offers us and, therefore, why we may be interested in it. We show that NNP, properly defined, can be u...Read more...
Cliff Attfield and Sonia R Bhalotra
We estimate semiparametric Engel curves for rural Pakistan using a large household survey. This allows us to obtain consistent estimates of the effects of household size and composition on consumption patterns even when ...Read more...
February 1998
This paper investigates the efficiency wage hypothesis and derives a tractable expression for the profit loss incurred by deviations from the efficiency wage. The extent of the wage deviation can be inferred from product...Read more...
This article examines the links that have recently been studied between poverty, high fertility and undernourishment, on the one hand, and degradation of the local environmental-resource base and civic disconnection, on ...Read more...
January 1998
Amartya Sen
Economic analysis of hunger calls for an informationally broad approach that takes adequate account of the distinct interdependences involved. This paper examines the interdependences between (1) income and food consumpt...Read more...
November 1997
Inequality of incomes can differ substantially from inequality in other 'spaces' such as well-being, freedom, health, longevity, and quality of life. Given the massive sclae of unemployment in contemporary European econo...Read more...
Jean Drèze, Peter Lanjouw and Naresh Sharma
This paper presents a case study of credit transactions in Palanpur, a north Indian village. Drawing on detailed informtion from all borrowers and lenders in the village, we examine a number of issues related to the func...Read more...
September 1997
This article is about the concept of optimum population and consumption. Even though it is primarily concerned with foundational issues, the various ideas that have been discussed in the literature are tested in the cont...Read more...
July 1997
In this article I argue that, in contrast to what is implicitly assumed in many popular writings on food security in the future, the interface that connects the problems of population growth, poverty, environmental degra...Read more...
Standard indicators of economic success leave out many aspects of development that are crucial to the well-being and freedom of citizens. We have to examine critically the ends as well as the means involved in developmen...Read more...
April 1997
There has been a shift, in recent years, in the understanding of the process of development. It is not a switch (as often portrayed) from a state-dependent view of development to a market-reliant view. Rather, it involve...Read more...
March 1997
Geeta Gandhi Kingdon
Labour market discrimination against women and parental discrimination against daughters are two of the most commonly cited explanations of the gender gap in education in developing countries. This study empirically test...Read more...
January 1997