This paper uses willingness to pay (WTP) data from a field experiment in Hyderabad, India in 2013 to determine whether non-monetary prices better target health products to the poor than monetary prices. Monetary WTP is increasing in income and non-monetary WTP is weakly decreasing in income....

The public distribution system (PDS) has been one of the main policy instruments of the Government of India (GoI) to provide food security to the people of this country, especially the vulnerable ones. The recently enacted National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013, also relies heavily on it to...

Using a household production model of educational choices, we characterise a free market situation in which some agents (high wagers) educate their children full-time and spend a sizable amount of resources on them, while others (low wagers) educate them only partially. The free-market...

The Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) - the largest food subsidy program in India - has been a dismal failure in targeting the poor. The present paper examines its performance in three Indian states - Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, based on primary data collected for this...

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act waived Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) work requirements nationally in 2010 and broadened the eligibility for receiving waivers in subsequent years for Able-Bodied Adults without Dependents (ABAWD). From 2011 to 2016, many states...

Studies of take up in social insurance programs rarely distinguish between initial enrollment and retention of beneficiaries. This paper shows that retention plays a meaningful role in incomplete take up: despite knowledge of and eligibility for a near-cash public benefit, many participants exit...

The public provision of private goods can be used as a self-selection device to identify income groups. This allows cost efficient redistribution between income groups even if the government cannot observe the individuals' incomes. This paper examines how redistribution through public provision...

In-kind transfers can provide insurance benefits when prices of consumption goods vary, as is common in developing countries. We develop a model demonstrating that in-kind transfers are welfare improving to beneficiaries relative to cash if the covariance between the marginal utility of income...