Distributing subsidized health products through existing health infrastructure could substantially and cost-effectively improve health in sub-Saharan Africa. There is, however, widespread concern that poor governance – in particular, limited health worker accountability – seriously undermines the effectiveness of subsidy programs. We audit targeted bednet distribution programs to quantify the e...

We study the effects on accountability in government service delivery of decentralizing administration of an antipoverty program. While governments at both central and local levels are vulnerable to antipoor policy biases owing to political capture, centralized delivery systems are additionally prone to bureaucratic corruption, owing to problems in monitoring bureaucratic performance. Decentral...

This paper investigates neighborhood peer eff ects on individual welfare using a combined IV and control function approach. The empirical analysis is based on panel data for the years 2007-2010 constructed by enriching the geo-referenced version of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) with aggregated zip code level-information. The results suggest that individual welfare use is positively co...

Child Poverty and Changes in Child Poverty in Rich Countries Since 1990 This paper documents levels and changes in child poverty rates in 12 OECD countries using data from the Luxembourg Income Study project, and focusing upon an analysis of the reasons for changes over the 1990s. The objective is to uncover the relative role of income transfers from the state in determining the magnitude and d...

This paper adopts the “Rip Van Winkle” stratagem, of asking what differences would be noticed, in the domain of poverty and distribution, by someone who fell asleep in 1987 (the year I published my paper on poverty in the IMF Staff Papers, and woke up only in 2007 (the year I visited the IMF to work on the present paper). I highlight, somewhat idiosyncratically, ten such differences under three...

Public-works programs in developing countries have recently attracted a lot of attention as anti-poverty initiatives. This paper analyzes the labor-market impacts of the largest public-works program in the world, the Indian NREGS, using information about its rollout in a regression-discontinuity design. The results suggest that the overall employment and casual wage impacts are small, although ...

Studying Labor Market Institutions in the Lab: Minimum Wages, Employment Protection and Workfare A central concern in economics is to understand the interplay between institutions and labor markets. In this paper we argue that laboratory experiments are a powerful tool for studying labor market institutions. One of the most important advantages is the ability to implement truly exogenous instit...

We provide new evidence on business cycle fluctuations in skewed labor income risk the United States, Germany, Sweden, and France. document four results. First, all countries, skewness of individual growth is strongly procyclical, whereas its variance flat acyclical. Second, this result also holds for continuously employed, full-time workers, indicating that hours margin not main driver; additi...

We evaluate an intervention targeting early life nutrition and well-being for households in extreme poverty Northern Nigeria. The leads to large sustained improvements children’s anthropometric health outcomes, including 8 percent reduction stunting 4 years, post-intervention. These impacts are partly driven by information-related channels. However, the certain substantial flow of cash transfer...

Since 1982, all Alaskan residents have received a yearly cash dividend from the Alaska Permanent Fund. Using Current Population Survey and synthetic control method, this paper shows that had no effect on employment increased part-time work by 1.8 percentage points (17 percent). A calibration of microeconomic macroeconomic effects suggests empirical results are consistent with stimulating local ...