This paper reproduces a chapter from the author’s 2018 PhD thesis ‘The Digital Donga: Universal Access and Service in South Africa (1994 - 2014)’. The author’s subsequent book Regulating Telecommunications in SA: Universal Access & Service was published by Palgrave Press in 2020, and can...

As an embodiment of collaborative governance model, metropolitan planning organizations in the United States allocate federal, state, and local funds to member municipalities for transportation projects across their regions. To examine how institutional rules and power shape where public...

Most cities enjoy some autonomy over how they tax their residents, and that autonomy is typically exercised by multiple municipal governments within a given city. In this chapter, we document patterns of city-level taxation across countries, and we review the literature on a number of salient...

As many countries are seeing the first signs of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, they are also shifting their policies from limiting the immediate economic impact of the pandemic on households and businesses to designing strategies that will revive long-term growth. Systemic challenges, such...

We show that hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 had a positive impact on the life satisfaction and happiness of Londoners during the Games, compared to residents of Paris and Berlin. Notwithstanding issues of causal inference, the magnitude of the effects is equivalent to moving from the bottom...

Hosting the Olympic Games costs billions of taxpayer dollars. Following a quasi- experimental setting, this paper assesses the intangible impact of the London 2012 Olympics, using a novel panel of 26,000 residents in London, Paris, and Berlin during the summers of 2011, 2012, and 2013. We show...

Subjective well-being has in recent years been recognised as a goal of development that captures non-monetary or subjective dimensions of well-being. The body of evidence on the individual and societal determinants of subjective well-being is growing, but the literature remains in its infancy as...

This paper offers a new way of assessing government cash transfers using a social welfare function framework. It demonstrates how one can use social welfare functions to measure the efficiency of such program s without requir ing the specif ication of a poverty line or particular poverty...

Numerous microfinance initiatives around the world aim to alleviate poverty in developing countries. However, debate persists about their effectiveness and sustainability - a concern for transnational corporations and the international business community, which contribute about $9.4 billion to...