Citizens in developing countries support politicians who provide patronage or clientelist benefits, such as government jobs and gifts at the time of elections. Can access to mass media that broadcasts public interest messages shift citizens' preferences for such benefits? This paper examines the...

Mass media play a crucial role in information distribution and in the political market and public policy making. Theory predicts that information provided by the mass media reflects the media's incentives to provide news to different groups in society and affects these groups' influence in...

The government provision of free or subsidized bed nets to combat malaria in Benin allows the identification of new channels through which mass media affect public policy outcomes. Prior research has concluded that governments provide greater private benefits to better-informed individuals....

Does radio access improve public service provision? And if so, does it do so by increasing government accountability to citizens, or by persuading households to take advantage of publicly-provided services? Prior research has argued that citizens with greater access to mass media receive greater...

This paper proposes a model-based approach to estimate income boundaries for identifying the middle class in Kazakhstan over 2003-15. The approach exploits the subjective evaluation of Kazakhstan households about their social status, relating self-declared social class membership to income....

This paper studies welfare dynamics, especially changes associated with middle-class status in countries in the Middle East and North Africa, before and after the Arab Spring transitions, using objective and subjective welfare measures. Absent panel data, the analysis employs state-of-the-art...

Rapid economic growth over the past two decades lifted millions of people out of poverty in Central Asia. But the uneven spread of prosperity left many communities struggling to catch up. To support lagging regions within countries, each of the region's five national governments has made...

This paper introduces a variety of concepts and methods to examine living standards improvements in Nepal in a dynamic perspective. Using data from three rounds of Nepal Living Standards Surveys conducted in the past two decades, together with data from a nationally representative survey that...