Despite their explicit focus on reaching the poor, many community driven development (CDD) initiatives are only partially successful in targeting spending towards them. This paper examines Tanzania's flagship CDD program and provides new evidence on the mechanisms by which the demand-driven...

This paper examines the implications associated with a recent Supreme Court ruling, Kelo v. City of New London. Kelo can be interpreted as supporting eminent domain as a means of transferring property rights from one set of private agents — landowners — to another private agent — a...

In this questionnaire study, individuals were asked to prioritise publicly provided preventive health care services, one of which would be unavailable to them by virtue of their sex. The aim was to establish whether men and women would exhibit different degrees of self-interest when making a...

Universities compete for candidates for studies. This phenomenon should be particularly evident in the case of popular mass study programs like economics or law. The choice of a university and the study programs is affected by the level of perceived quality of education and the tuition paid....

In a decentralized setting, are policy targets imposed by the central government on local elected officials effective? And when? We address these questions in Italy, where the central government has set a target for childcare coverage at the municipal level for Southern regions since 2007. We...

This paper identifies a novel political-economy explanation for the observed variation in the cash and in-kind (basic health care, public housing or food stamps) mixture of social transfers. We put forward the hypothesis that the share of in-kind transfers is positively correlated with...

The European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC) is a European legal instrument designed to facilitate and promote cross-border, transnational and interregional cooperation. It was introduced in 2006 to enable public authorities of various Member States to team up and deliver joint...

The effects of free of charge state education on income distribution are often studied by allocating government education outlays to households, assuming that these outlays equal the benefit which households attach to state schooling. This paper proposes a demand analysis approach to estimating...

Under complicated billing structures, the price to which consumers respond remains inconclusive. In this paper, I exploit a quasi-experiment to estimate a causal effect of price for residential water customers during the introduction of increasing block rates for a North Carolina utility....

The Fukushima disaster has lead the French government to release novel cost information relative to its nuclear electricity program allowing us to compute a levelized cost. We identify a modest escalation of capital cost and a larger than expected operational cost. Under the best scenario, the...