In many developing country settings, and particularly in rural areas, the implementation of anything more than very rudimentary contracts for medical care providers, including public employees, is virtually impossible. In this paper, we examine the kinds of policy levers that governments might conceivably have available to induce physicians to serve in rural areas. Using simple models of screen...

This study estimates the impact of an American rural public health program on child mortality over 1908 to 1933. Due to the absence of sanitation and childoriented health services outside of urban areas, public and private agencies sponsored county-level health departments (CHDs) throughout the US. Variation in the location and timing of the CHDs identifies improvements in population health, wh...

This paper examines the equilibrium price effects of the privatization of housing assets that were previously owned and allocated by the state. I develop a theoretical framework that shows that privatization can have ambiguous effects on prices in the private market, and that the degree of misallocation of the assets prior to privatization determines the subsequent price effects. I test the pre...

This paper provides an overview of methodologies used to analyze inter-regional income inequality, and a critical survey of empirical studies that deal with Russian regions. It discusses implications of the growth theory regarding dynamics of inter-economy income inequality. Methodologies for empirically analyzing income inequality are classified as the cross-section approach, time series appro...

This paper analyzes the evolution of Chinese urban income distribution across space and time in post-reform era. Our results suggest no evidence on income convergence across cities during the period 1984-2003. We find that cities with comparable income level are likely to be co-located in the same region; further, cities tend to mirror the mobility of their counterparts located in the same prov...

We posit that autocrats introduce local elections when their bureaucratic capacity is low. Local exploit citizens’ informational advantage in keeping officials accountable, but they also weaken vertical control. As increases, the autocrat limits role of elected bodies to regain argue these insights can explain introduction village rural China and subsequent erosion autonomy years later. constru...

Connecting private dwellings to the water main is expensive and typically cannot be publicly financed. We show that households’ willingness to pay for a private connection is high when it can be purchased on credit, not because a connection improves health but because it increases the time available for leisure and reduces interand intra-household conflicts on water matters, leading to sustaine...

This paper exploits an unusual transportation setting to generate some of the first revealed preference value of a statistical life (VSL) estimates from a low-income setting. We estimate the trade-offs individuals are willing to make between mortality risk and cost as they travel to and from the international airport in Sierra Leone. The setting and original dataset allow us to address some typ...

Williamson (1965) argued that catching up countries experiencing strong national growth tend also to see a widening in regional disparities, whereas in more developed economies strong national growth and falling regional disparities could go hand in hand. We find some evidence of a trade-off between national growth and regional dispersion in the EU’s Cohesion countries, notably in Spain and Ire...

This paper has two main objectives. First, it estimates the impact of related and unrelated variety of European regions’ knowledge structure on their patenting activity. Second, it looks at the role of technological relatedness and extra-local knowledge acquisitions for local innovative activity. Specifically, it assesses how external technological relatedness affects regional innovation perfor...