This paper describes the results of an impact evaluation of the National Solidarity Programme, a community-driven development programme in Afghanistan that created democratic village councils and funded small-scale development projects. Using a randomized controlled trial across 500 villages, we...

This paper employs an instrumental variables approach to identify the effect of party ideology on policy outcomes. Exogenous variation in party representation is generated by the assassination of the leader of the populist Congress Party, which occurred mid-way through India's national elections...

A large and growing literature links high levels of ethnic diversity to low levels of public goods provision. Yet while the empirical connection between ethnic heterogeneity and the underprovision of public goods is widely accepted, there is little consensus on the specific mechanisms through...

Philanthropy is one of the enduring areas of economic research. Why would people work hard only to give their earnings away? The paper explores the theoretical foundations, as well as the empirical and policy research on philanthropy. This paper reviews over 25 years worth of economic research,...

The for-profit hospital is in the minority numerically in all developed countries. Although the for-profits' market share has been quite stable for decades, for-profit chains have grown in share and influence in the United States. By contrast, for-profit chains have made few inroads in other...

This paper focuses on the relationship between public action and access to public goods. It begins by developing a simple model to capture the various mechanisms that are discussed in the theoretical literature on collective action. We use the model to illustrate the special assumptions embedded...

During the Covid 19 Pandemic, there have been countless calls for the creation of ''global public goods'' or ''global commons'' issued by a variety of actors with sometimes diametrically opposed views, as if the two notions had the same meaning. And indeed, even today these notions are still...

This paper studies public goods provision in an experiment in which contributors repeatedly interact with rent-extracting administrators. Our main result is that the presence of an administrator reduces contributions but only because rent extraction lowers the MPCR. Analysing the dynamic...

When deciding on the social desirability of public investment, the cost of a project is sometimes adjusted by a factor known as the Marginal Cost of Public Funds (MCPF) which captures the cost of raising public funds through distortionary taxation. However, there is no scholarly consensus on...

Media content is an important privately supplied public good. While it has been shown that contributions to a public good crowd out other contributions in many cases, the issue has not been thoroughly studied for media markets yet. We show that in a standard model of commercial media bias,...