Presidential elections in Korea in the eighties and nineties provide an opportunity to examine the role of political patronage in a newly formed democracy. We examine whether the bureaucratic reshuffling which accompanies presidential changes depends on the political connections of bureaucrats...

Despite the decline in group inequality and the rapid expansion of the black middle class in the United States, major urban centers with significant black populations continue to exhibit extreme levels of racial separation. Using a theoretical framework in which individuals care both about the...

We show how an optimization algorithm can be used to approximately quantify the costs to users of spatial misallocation in centrally provided goods.These methods can be employed to evaluate the large programs of public good construction that have been central features of economic plans in many...

Very poor households may be excluded from public programs intended for their benefit for a variety of reasons as lack information, a permanent residence or membershiip in social networks. We are interested in methods of testing for such exclusion based on independently drawn samples of program...

This paper examines how public goods get allocated by a centralized state. We use data on social structure and public goods in rural India over the sixties, seventies and eighties to examine the influence of particular social groups, and of social and economic heterogeneity more generally, on...

This paper explores the manner in which race and income interact to determine patterns of residential location in metropolitan areas. We use a framework in which individuals care about both the level of affluence and the racial composition of their communities, and in which there are differences...

We discuss nonparametric methods and statistical tests that are appropriate to assess poverty targeting in public programs. These methods explicitly account for the possibility that the population distributions of participants and non-participants cross. Crossing points provide us with upper...

We use a proprietary data set on the floor-level operations at the Bhilai Rail and Structural Mill in India to understand the determinants of changes in plant productivity in 2000-2003. During this period there was a 35 percent increase in output with minimal changes in factors of production,...

We use a proprietary data set on the floor-level operations at the Bhilai Rail and Structural Mill (RSM) in India to understand how output rose sharply in response to competitive pressures. Output increases came predominantly from reductions in production delays of various kinds. We model...