In July 2000, the Taipei City Government launched an anti-poverty program, Taipei Family Development Accounts, which drew heavily on Sherradeniquest;s asset-based welfare theory, and was to provide matched savings accounts for low-income families in the City. This paper presents the...

This paper uses panel data from the 16 main states in India during the period 1967- 1999 to study the effects of having higher female representation in the State Legislatures on public goods, policy and expenditure. I find that women legislators make different decisions than men legislators....

Why do elected officials often suffer from political paralysis and fail to implement the best policies available? This paper considers a new yet intuitive explanation that focuses on the quality of the politicians competing to replace the incumbent. The key insight is that a 'good' incumbent...

This paper studies the role played by caste, education and other social and economic attributes in arranged marriages among middle-class Indians. We use a unique data set on individuals who placed matrimonial advertisements in a major newspaper, the responses they received, how they ranked them,...

We report on an on-going project, which asks a number of questions relevant to the study of state capacity. What are the main economic and political determinants of the state's capacity to raise revenue and support private markets? How do risks of violent conflict affect the incentives to invest...

This paper explores the consequences of creating and improving property rights so that fixed assets can be used as collateral. This has become a cause célèbre of Hernando de Soto whose views are influential in debates about policy reform concerning property rights. Hence, we refer to the...

Local linear fitting is a popular nonparametric method in nonlinear statistical and econometric modelling. Lu and Linton (2007) established the point wise asymptotic distribution (central limit theorem) for the local linear estimator of nonparametric regression function under the condition of...

Bajari, Benkard and Levin (2007) propose an estimation methodology for a broad class of dynamic optimization problems. To carry out their procedure, one needs to select a set of alternative policy functions and compare the implied expected payoffs with that from the data. We show that this can...

Building on previous studies on perceptions of inequality, welfare and risk we investigate the structure of individualsamp;apos' rankings of uncertain prospects in terms of risk and their relationship to individual preferences. We examine three interlinked propositions that are fundamental to...

This paper documents the convergence of incomes across Indian states over the period 1965 to 1998. It departs from traditional analyses of convergence by tracking the evolution of the entire income distribution, instead of standard regression and time series analyses. The findings reveal...