Ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development. This paper provides credible quantification of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in Kenyan districts across the 1963-2011 period. Guided by a model it then examines whether the transition in and out of democracy...

In Sub-Saharan Africa, 600 million people live without electricity. Despite ambitions of governments and donors to invest in rural electrification, decisions about how to extend electricity access are being made in the absence of rigorous evidence. Using a novel dataset of 20,000 geo-tagged...

The Millennium Development Goals call for reducing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water. This goal was adopted in large part because clean water was seen as critical to fighting diarrheal disease, which kills 2 million children annually. There is...

This article develops and implements a simulation approach to value patents and patent-protected R&D projects based on the Real Options approach. It takes into account uncertainty in the cost-to-completion of the project, uncertainty in the cash flows to be generated from the project, and the...

Objective: We evaluated the impact of Seguro Popular (SP), a program introduced in 2001 in Mexico primarily to finance health care for the poor. We studied the effect of SP on pregnant women's access to obstetrical services. Data: We analyzed the cross-sectional 2006 National Health and...

The role of good management practices in organizations has recently been emphasized. Do the same principles also apply in government organizations, even the most bureaucratic and hierarchical of them? And can skilled, motivated managers identify how to improve these practices, or is there a role...

We study the design of randomized controlled experiments in environments where outcomes are significantly affected by unobserved effort decisions taken by the subjects(agents). While standard randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are internally consistent, the unobservability of effort provision...

This study investigates the performance of the financial system in Burundi in mobilizing and allocating resources. Although the study does not presume that finance is the most binding constraint to growth and socio-economic development in Burundi, it takes the view that unlocking the financing...