A vision of universalised human freedom, equality, security and democracy emerged in the wake of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the British Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. This vision, not even approximately practicable at the time, is now well within reach. A...

Past research has provided evidence of clientelistic politics in delivery of programme benefits by local governments, or gram panchayats (GPs), and manipulation of GP programme budgets by legislators and elected officials at upper tiers in West Bengal, India. Using household panel survey data...

On the whole, poor countries in Africa and elsewhere seem to have weathered the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19) pandemic better than wealthier countries with superior healthcare systems. Using the Ghanaian case, this paper draws on newspaper articles, policy statements, and other secondary...

This paper provides novel evidence on the trade-off between public service delivery and free riding in low- and middle-income countries. We implement a field experiment in the slums of two major Indian cities, where inadequate access to sanitation restricts residents to either free ride, by...

Experiments involving multiple public goods with contribution thresholds capture many features of charitable giving environments in which donors try to coordinate their contributions across various potential recipients. We present results from a laboratory experiment that introduces endowment...

Experimental studies have modeled individual funding of social projects as contributions to a threshold public good. We examine donors’ behavior when they face multiple threshold public goods and the possibility of coordinating their contributions via an intermediary. Employing the...

SThis paper is a single-project meta-analysis of four experiments that first model charitable giving as individual contributions to a multiplicity of competing threshold public goods. Given the centrality of the coordination dilemma as the number of recipients increases, we pool 15,936...

This paper introduces a theory-based equivalence scale for public in-kind transfers, which justifies comparison of distributions of extended income (cash income plus the value of public services) between European countries. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed equivalence scale in an...

Die Forschungsdateninfrastruktur in Deutschland ist vielschichtig und wird laufend verbessert. Um jedoch international wettbewerbsfähig zu sein, muss die deutsche Dateninfrastruktur weiterentwickelt werden. Es dient dem Gemeinwohl, wenn es Forschenden ermöglicht wird, auf Daten aus...

We present a model of public good provision with a distributor. Our main result describes a symmetric mixed-strategy equilibrium, where all agents contribute to a common fund with probability p and the distributor provides either a particular amount of public goods or nothing. A corollary of...