This paper presents new evidence on the role of public health insurance in mitigating the adverse outcomes associated with health shocks. I exploit a natural experiment from the rollout of universal health insurance in rural China. Using longitudinal data spanning the period in question, I find that health insurance helps households maintain investment in children’s human capital and agricultur...

In many developing countries, the majority of physicians employed in government clinics also have a private practice. We develop a simple model to show that allowing dual practice helps low-income governments retain skilled physicians to assure patient access. If dual-practice providers di¤erentially refer higherincome patients to private practice, public funding becomes more e¤ectively targete...

This study examines the causal relationship between foreign direct investment and economic growth. Methodology is based on the Toda-Yamamoto test for causality relationship and the bounds testing (ARDL). Time-series data covering the period 19702005 for Malaysia, the study found, in the case of Malaysia there is no strong evidence of a bi-directional causality and long-run relationship between ...

In this paper, we examine the progressivity of social sector expenditures in eight sub-Saharan African countries. We employ dominance tests, complemented by extended Gini/concentration coefficients, to determine whether health and education expenditures redistribute resources to the poor. We find that social services are poorly targeted. Among the services examined, primary education tends to b...

This paper examines whether an intra-household externality prevents adoption of a technology with substantial implications for population health and the environment: improved cookstoves. Motivated by a model of intra-household decision-making, the experiment markets stoves to husbands or wives in turn at randomly varying prices. We find that women – who bear disproportionate cooking costs – hav...

This paper focuses on the political economy of policy reform in post-socialist countries. It investigates the impact of institutions on economic transformation processes and seeks to develop and empirically test a concept of governance that will strengthen policy reforms and make them sustainable. By arguing that effective policy reforms require an adequate politico-institutional foundation, th...

Does corruption grease or sand the wheels of economic growth? This paper provides a systematic evaluation of the e ect of corruption on growth, using metaanalysis techniques for 460 estimates from 41 studies. We nd that publication bias, albeit acute, does not dissipate the genuine and negative e ect of corruption on growth. Among the main factors explaining the variation in the estimated effec...