We report an experiment in 3,000 villages that tested whether incentives improve aid efficacy. Villages received block grants for maternal and child health and education that incorporated relative performance incentives. Subdistricts were randomized into incentives, an otherwise identical program without incentives, or control. Incentives initially improved preventative health indicators, parti...

This paper investigates whether academic peer quality in colleges reduces social distance between castes in India by examining academic peer effects across castes. Using cutoff based admission rules and a unique data set linking admission data to college exit exam scores; I find that the better quality of high-caste students has a negative effect on the performance of the low-caste students. Th...

This research analyses through the use of instrumental variables estimation whether democracy has an effect on variables belonging to three different categories: fiscal policy, inequality in income distribution and political instability. It shows there is no stable relation between democracy and fiscal policy variables between countries of the sample in the 1978-1988 period. Democracy, on the o...

In this note we study the distortions in an endogenous growth model developed by Grimaud and Tournemaine (2007), where new pieces of knowledge are produced in a R&D sector and used to reduce pollution emissions. Using this model along with a realistic calibration, we conclude that the economy strongly underinvests in R&D, such that the policy maker would need to implement a strong tax-subsidy s...

JEL Bibliographic Code O15, O18, O47, O53 We postulate that inferior factor productivity in China’s noncoastal provinces is a principal reason for their lower economic growth despite high investment rates relative to provincial GDP. We flnd that TFP is roughly twice as high in the coastal provinces and estimate that investment in higher education and foreign direct investment help explain the p...

Th is paper analyses the nature and causes of the patterns of inequality and poverty in India. Since the economic liberalization in the early 1990s, the evidence suggests increasing inequality (in both spatial and vertical terms) as well as persistent poverty. Th e macroeconomic policies possibly responsible for these trends include—fi scal tightening, regressive tax policies and expenditure cu...

conclusion our results showed that obtained protein patterns of the isolated strains were more reliable than serotyping results for typing purposes. our findings indicated that pap adhesion–encoding operon has an important role in the development and severity of uti. many cases of serious urogenital diseases are caused by a limited number of uropathogenic e.coli strains that generally possess s...