What motivates individuals to become politicians? This is an important question in decentralized democracies, where local politicians play a key role in public goods provision. However, and in emerging economies, bureaucratic hurdles and administrative failures introduce uncertainty about the...

We examine how village level social group dominance affects the educational and occupational mobility of minority and other social groups in rural India across multiple generations. Theoretically, we distinguish between upper caste and own group dominance and examine the mechanisms underpinning...

We examine how village-level social group dominance affects the educational and occupational mobility of minority and other social groups in rural India across multiple generations. We distinguish between upper caste and own-group dominance and examine the mechanisms underpinning inequality in...

In emerging economies, pro-social policy outcomes may be prevented by bureaucratic inefficiency, capture by elected or non-elected office holders, or by other hurdles. For local citizens, uncertainty about the true cause of such failures often prevails. We study the pro-sociality of politicians'...

The Chronic Poverty Report on Growth aims to put in front of economic policymakers in developing countries and international agencies evidence about the type of growth and the policies and interventions that will best allow the poor to escape poverty and stay out of it through growth. Growth...

We use the nation-wide policy of randomly allocating village council headships to women to identify the impact of female political leadership on the governance of projects implemented under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India. Using primary survey data, we find more program...

In spite of widespread acclaims of social audits as low-cost and powerful participatory tools that can bolster awareness and improve public service delivery, a key policy question is what such audits have achieved so far. Using a unique panel data set assembled from official social audit...

Many African countries are richly endowed with land, but the productive potential of the land base has been underutilised in farming systems with low intensity of external inputs and high intensity of labour. At the same time, mining and erosion of soils have been common features of rural Africa...

In this paper, a model of the nitrogen cycle in the soil is incorporated in a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model of the Tanzanian economy, thus establishing a two way link between the environment and the economy. For a given level of natural soil productivity, profit maximising farmers...

Increasing the share of women in politics is regularly promoted as a means of reducing corruption. In this paper, we look for evidence of a gender gap in dishonesty among elected representatives, as well as how this changes with time in office. Based on a sample of 356 inexperienced and...