In South Africa, at a time when National Health Insurance should be generously funded (7 years after its approval as public policy by the ruling party), state fiscal austerity appears certain to nip the initiative in the bud. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund issued separate reports about South Africa in late 2014, following a new finance minister's mid-term budget speech. In j...

Much of the literature on microfinance performance has concentrated on the effects of institution-specific practices, but there have been comparatively few attempts to analyze how the broader economic environment affects the performance of microfinance institutions (MFIs). Drawing on the work of Ahlin and Lin (2006), who find that numerous macroeconomic indicators affect MFI performance, this p...

An authorization decision is a binary decision taken by an institution, determining whether certain economic transactions are allowed to take place. They may involve granting a status to an individual, approving a new product, and so forth. Institutions seek to be consistent with their past decisions, as well as with their regulations. Consistency with past decisions is axiomatized: it is shown...

I propose to show how to translate the economic analysis of institutions developed in the tradition of “worst case” political economy into the lingua franca of robust statistics. An institution will be defined as contingent upon a design theory and the difficulty we consider is the use of the institution by the designer. The technical bridge between institutional robustness and statistical robu...

Francis Kariuki* Abstract Colonialism impacted the social, cultural, political and economic aspects of Africans in the most fundamental and radical way. With colonialism, a western legal tradition premised upon an Anglo-American jurisprudential thought was imposed on Africans. African values, norms and beliefs, which provided the normative and undergirding framework for conflict resolution, wer...

This paper contributes to the recent debates and emerging concepts in the international business literature by applying a social-institutionalist perspective that focuses on the processes of institution building in ventures between Western multinational corporations and post-socialist enterprises. It is argued that the knowledge and learning processes within these transnational sites are consti...

Leveraging unique data from four villages in Southern Ghana (Goldstein and Udry, 1999), we present and test a theoretical model where agents in a two-person agricultural household make individual portfolio allocations while looking forward to an intrahousehold bargaining process. The specific context is that of subsistence agriculture where individuals within households farm separate plots but ...

Coastal cities have been at the forefront of China’s economic reform and open-door policy. However, regional differences in cost and income have prompted the government to encourage interior development since the late 1990s. Foreign direct investment (FDI) is one of the most mobile forms of capital and is a key agent of urban spatial transformation in China. This paper examines intra-metropolit...

Pharmacy and therapeutics committees commonly cite a lack of generalizability as a reason for not incorporating cost-effectiveness information into decision making. To address this concern, many committees undertake site-specific economic evaluations, which are often limited by small sample sizes and nonrandomized designs. We show how 2 complementary approaches were used to minimize these limit...