This paper investigates whether the religious identity of state legislators in India influences development outcomes, both for citizens of their religious group and for the population as a whole. To allow politician identity to be correlated with constituency level voter preferences or events...

We exploit the introduction of sulfa drugs in 1937 to identify the causal impact of exposure to pneumonia in infancy on later life well-being and productivity in the United States. Using census data from 1980-2000, we find that cohorts born after the introduction of sulfa experienced increases...

We investigate whether politician gender influences policy outcomes in India. We focus upon antenatal and postnatal public health provision since the costs of poor services in this domain are disproportionately borne by women. Accounting for potential endogeneity of politician gender and the...

There is a widespread belief that peer effects are important in charitable giving, but surprisingly little evidence on how donors respond to their peers in practice. Analysing a unique dataset of donations to online fundraising pages, we show that peer effects are positive and sizeable: a £10...

There is a widespread belief that peer effects are important in charitable giving, but surprisingly little evidence on how donors respond to their peers. We analyse a unique dataset of donations to online fundraising pages to provide evidence on the direction and magnitude of peer effects – we...

Using a unique field experiment we show that prompts to leave money to charity during the will-making process substantially increase the probability of making a bequest. Asking if the donor wants to leave money to charity doubles the proportion making a bequest; adding emotional and social cues...

Using 10-year neighborhood-level panels derived from personal tax records in Canada, we find that local ethnic and religious diversity are inversely related to charitable donations. A 10 percentage point increase in ethnic diversity is associated with a 14% reduction in donations. The same...

Using a unique field experiment we show that prompts to leave money to charity during the will-making process substantially increase the probability of making a bequest. Asking if the donor wants to leave money to charity doubles the proportion making a bequest; adding emotional and social cues...

This paper uses a survey-based approach to test alternative methods of channeling tax relief to donors – as a tax rebate for the donor or as a matched payment to the receiving charity. On accounting grounds these two are equivalent but, in line with earlier experimental studies, we find that...

Besley and Ghatak (2001) show that public good should be owned by the agent who values the public good most — irrespective of technological factors. In this paper we relax their assumptions in a natural way by allowing the agents to be indispensable and show that relative valuations are not...