Unannounced visits were made to health clinics in Bangladesh to determine what proportion of medical professionals were at their assigned post. Averaged over all job categories and types of facility, the absentee rate was 35 percent. The absentee rate for physicians was 40 percent at the larger...

In a risky world should governments provide public goods that reduce risk or compensate the victims of bad outcomes through social insurance? This article examines a basic question in designing social protection policies: how should a government allocate a fixed budget between these two...

A public economics framework is used to consider how pharmaceuticals should be priced when at least some of the research and development incentive comes from sales revenues. Familiar techniques of public finance are used to relax some of the restrictions implied in the standard use of Ramsey...