We find that taller people enjoy a higher quality of life at older ages in China. Implications are drawn for investment in health human capital in infancy and adolescence.

This paper examines the relationship between democracy and economic growth in 30 Sub-Saharan African countries. As our proxy for democracy we first use the democracy index constructed by Freedom House and then check the sensitivity of our findings using, as an alternative proxy for democracy,...

The paper presents estimates of price elasticities of demand for twelve disaggregated alcohol beverages in Australia: premium beer, full strength beer, low alcohol beer, and mid strength beer; red bottled wine, white bottled wine, sparkling wine, cask wine, and dark and light ready-to-drink...

Data for discrete ordered random variables are often characterised by "excessive" zero observations. Traditional ordered probit models have limited capacity in explaining the preponderance of zero observations, especially when the zeros may relate to two distinct situations of non-participation...

This paper constructs a simple overlapping generations model to examine how the choice of public and private health expenditure is affected by preferences and economic factors under majority voting. In the model, agents with heterogeneous income decide how much to consume, save, and invest in...

Motivated by theoretical arguments that assert a positive impact of R&D on institutions, this paper aims to provide some empirical analysis on the relationship between these two variables. In particular this paper has found a significant direct effect of institutions on R&D intensity. Countries...

We experimentally evaluate two micro-lending schemes to finance high-value smallholder agriculture. Loans featured durations that matched crop cycles, low interest rates, dynamic repayment incentives and index insurance. In the TRAIL design, the lender incentivized a local trader to recommend...

While the primary aim of most Conditional Cash Transfer (or CCT) programs is to increase the level of human capital of children in poor households, there are also potentially large spillover effects associated with such programs. We illustrate this using data from the Familias en Accion (FA)...

The broad objectives of the Human Development Report (HDR) and the estimates of human wellbeing are to identify policies that reduce poverty, economic and gender inequalities inequalities and increase human wellbeing. Since inception in 1990, the HDR and the methodological and measurement issues...

We examine the causes and consequences of corruption in the provision of education service in Bangladesh. Our empirical analysis is based on the 2007 household survey data collected by Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB), which measure actual corruption. Our main findings are (i) both...