It has been argued that the potential gains of community-driven development (CDD) poverty programs are large as these can foster sustained poverty reduction. However, recent literature shows that community involvement can increase the risk of elite capture, particularly in more unequal...

With address to developing countries, this paper derives some formulae for the optimal price structure for publicly provided private goods. A general equilibrium model is examined, which makes it possible to incorporate features like distributional social objectives and public profit constraints...

In most applied cost-benefit analyses, individual willingness to pay is aggregated without using explicit welfare weights. This can be justified by postulating a utilitarian social welfare function, along with the assumption of equal marginal utility of income for all individuals. However, since...

A collective decision problem is described by a set of agents, a profile of single-peaked preferences over the real line and a number k of public facilities to be located. We consider public facilities that do not suffer from congestion and are non-excludable. We provide a characterization of...

A prevailing view in the literature is that social sanctions can support, in equilibrium, high levels of obedience to a costly norm. The reason is that social disapproval and stigmatization faced by the disobedient are highest when disobedience is the exception rather than the rule in society....

When private goods are publicly provided at subsidized prices, government authorities have to determine the distribution of services on recipients. Such distributions are commonly based on legal regulations and professional guidelines. Thus governments are assumed to develop service standards...

The aim of this paper is to quantify the relative importance of motivations based on warm-glow, social and moral norms and cost of time used recycling on household recycling efforts. We also test for crowding-out of intrinsic motivations when recycling is perceived as mandatory. We find that the...

When private goods are publicly provided, government authorities have to determine the distribution of services on recipients. In this paper, the public service provider is assumed to maximize utility defined over service supply to different target groups, given a budget constraint. The...

Increased household recycling is a policy goal in many countries. Household recycling is, to a large extent, based on voluntary efforts. It is thus interesting to understand the mechanisms behind household voluntary contributions to recycling, and how they are affected by various policy...

This paper investigates the long-term effects of local government education spending on child outcomes, including income, educational attainment, and family formation in adulthood. We propose a novel identification strategy which exploits quasirandom variation in demographic trends when there is...