Lack of access to finance is often cited as a key reason why poor people remain poor. This paper uses data on the Indian rural branch expansion program to provide empirial evidence on this issue. Between 1977 and 1990, the Indian Central Bank mandated that a commercial bank can open a branch in...

There has been a growing literature in both the US (for example Haurin and Brasington 1996, and Black 1999) and the UK (for example Gibbons & Machin, 2003) that estimates the way in which school quality is capitalised into house prices. Cheshire and Sheppard 1995 and 1999 estimated hedonic...

We consider the influence that mobile pupils have on the academic achievements of other pupils in English primary schools. We find that immobile pupils in year-groups (à la US “grades”) that experience high pupil entry rates progress less well academically between ages 8 and 11 than pupils...

Current debates about the sustainability of public commitments include discussion of the adequacy and affordability of collective health and social care responses to the rapidly growing needs of ageing communities. A recurrent theme in England is whether communities can play greater roles in...

We use British panel data to determine the exogenous impact of income on a number of individual health outcomes: general health status, mental health, physical health problems, and health behaviors (drinking and smoking). Lottery winnings allow us to make causal statements regarding the effect...

When health status is an ordered response variable, Allison and Foster (2004) postulate that a distribution Q exhibits more inequality than a distribution P if Q is obtained from P via a sequence of median preserving spreads. This paper introduces a parametric family of inequality...

We introduce the papers in this volume and put them into the context of the literature on land use regulation. We then synthesise and draw some conclusions from existing research on land use regulation and interpret the evidence currently available. In the light of this review we then identify...

This paper offers a critical appraisal of the now sizable empirical literature that values school quality and performance through housing valuations. This literature consistently finds housing valuations to be significantly higher in places where measured school quality is higher, implying a...

This study analyzes the sports infrastructure of Hamburg, Germany, from the residents’ perspective. Empirical evidence is provided using a micro-level dataset of 1,319 sports facilities, which is merged with highly disaggre-gated data on population, socio-demographic characteristics and land...