Many countries adopted safety net programs to deal with the food crisis of 2008. However, such programs are often beset with targeting errors, inefficiencies, and fraud. Despite this, there is no systematic comparative analysis of safety nets. The objective of this paper is to identify generic...

This paper explores the performance of rural governance institutions (Gram Panchayats) in Maharashtra, India. The results of a detailed set of household and village surveys we conducted point to a stunningly robust and participatory democratic process: Elections are freely contested, fairly...

It has recently been suggested in the agency literature that moral hazard in teams can be dealt with by introducing a third party who breaks the budget-balancing constraint, and that this facilitates the design of contracts that can sustain the Pareto optimum as a (perfect) Nash equilibrium....