Public works programs, aimed at building a strong social safety net through redistribution of wealth and generation of meaningful employment, are becoming increasingly popular in developing countries. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), enacted in August 2005, is one such program in India. This paper assesses causal impacts (Intentto-Treat) of NREGA on public works participatio...

The debate over whether to provide food-assistance and the form that this assistance should take has a long history in economics. Despite the ongoing debate, there is little rigorous evidence comparing food-assistance in the form of cash versus in-kind. This paper uses a randomized evaluation to assess the impacts and cost-effectiveness of cash, food-vouchers, and food transfers on food consump...

This paper documents the impact of voter turnout on top marginal tax rates in the 34 OECD countries for the period between 1974 and 2014. Across a number of specifications, I find that increases in voter turnout have a positive and statistically significant effect on top tax rates. This finding is broadly consistent with the median voter theorem that posits government redistribution to be a fun...

The idea that expanding work and consumption opportunities always increases people’s wellbeing is well established in economics but finds no support in psychology. Instead, there is evidence in both economics and psychology that people’s life satisfaction depends on how experienced utility compares with expectations of life satisfaction or decision utility. In this paper I suggest that expandin...

Heterogeneous Treatment and Self-Selection in a Wage Subsidy Experiment The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) is a research and demonstration project that offered a generous time-limited income supplement to randomly selected welfare applicants under two conditions. The first, the eligibility condition, required that they remain on welfare for at least twelve months. The second, the qualification ...

Efflux pumps of the resistance nodulation cell division (RND) transporter family, such as AcrB of Escherichia coli, play an important role in the development of multidrug resistance, but the molecular basis for their substrate promiscuity is not yet completely understood. From a collection of highly clarithromycin-resistant AcrB periplasmic domain mutants derived from in vitro random mutagenesi...

We study adult economic and health outcomes in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration, a randomized housing mobility experiment in which families living in highpoverty U.S. public housing projects in five cities were given vouchers to help them move to private housing units in lower-poverty neighborhoods. An “experimental” group was offered vouchers valid only in a low-poverty neighborho...

High levels of inequality are a persistent feature of many rural areas in the developing world. Rural inequality is correlated with major impediments of rural development, such as crime, elite-capture, and lack of collective action. Government transfer programs, such as conditional cash transfer, unemployment insurance, old-age pension or similar programs that target the lower tail of a village...

The Impact on Nutrition of the Intrahousehold Distribution of Power The distribution of income within the household is found to matter for the allocation of resources towards nutrition. Rural Mexican households do not pool income, nor do they attain a Pareto-efficient allocation of resources. In contrast to what is commonly done in the literature, I do not assume that only the head of household...

In this paper we develop a general equilibrium overlapping generations (OLG) model with health shocks to study the life-cycle behaviors of health care spending and financing. We show that a calibrated version of our model is able to match the life-cycle trend of insurance take up ratios and average medical expenditure from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) data in 2004/05. We then app...