In our earlier work, we used data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to examine life-cycle patterns in health status and in the joint distribution of health status and income (Deaton and Paxson, 1998). In this paper we summarize and extend those results, and provide new evidence...

This paper examines the impact of political compet ition on b lock grants from federal to sub-federal levels of government. We model the extent and direction of income redistribution as determined proximately by the political agendas of central decisionmakers and, at a deeper level, by the...

In this paper we examine the relationship between educational inputs and school outcomes in South Africa immediately before the end of apartheid government and, in doing so, we add to what is known about the impact of exogenous changes in school quality on child outcomes. There are three...

In recent years, in much of the World Bank's operational work as well as in applied research, consumption aggregates constructed from survey data have been used to measure poverty, to analyse changes in living standards, over time, and to assess the distributional impacts of various programs and...

The purpose of this paper is to derive necessary conditions for the optimal control in the presence of threshold effects when the threshold is a curve in n-dimensional space of uncertain location. The usefulness of these conditions is shown by examining the optimal regulation of two greenhouse...

This paper introduces a tractable, structural model of subjective beliefs. Since agents that plan for the future care about expected future utility flows, current felicity can be increased by believing that better outcomes are more likely. On the other hand, expectations that are biased towards...

This paper studies the interactions between an individual self-steem and his social environment, whether in the workplace, at school, or in personal relationships. A person generally has only imperfect knowledge of his own ability (or long-term pay) in pursuing a task, and will undertake it only...

This paper analyzes the self-identification process and its role in motivation. We build a model of self-confidence where people have imperfect knowledge about their ability, which in most tasks is a complement to effort in determining performance. Higher self-confidence thus enhances...