Medicare expenditures as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) are now six times larger than they were in 1967. Forecasts for the next 75 years show that almost $1 of every $5 of GDP could be spent on Medicare. That is unaffordable. Without intervention, Medicare's share of GDP will force some...

Fifty years ago, Congress enacted the Tax Reform Act of 1969 to regulate charitable activity of the rich. Congress constricted the influence of the wealthy on private foundations and hindered the abuse of dollars put into charitable solution through income tax rules. Concerned that the likes of...

This paper evaluates a new technology for providing water. The technology, developed by Haiti Outreach (HO), is distinguished by a program training communities to manage wells. The effects of training are identified by comparing HO's wells with wells refurbished by HO but subsequently managed...

How did eighteenth-century China manage to provide public goods nationwide despite its low tax rate? We construct a prefecture-level panel dataset from 1738 to 1820 and examine the effectiveness of the provision of public goods by the state granary system and elite services in mitigating price...

In many low-income countries, local public goods are provided by non-governmental organizations and local communities, rather than by government. In rural Tanzania, more than 500 organizations install different technologies of water pumps which local communities are then responsible for...

We conduct a controlled field experiment in 52 communities in rural Bolivia to investigate the effect that local authorities have on voluntary public good provision. In our study, community members pool resources to provide environmental education material for local schools. We find that...

Club goods are an important category of collective goods. However, unlike public goods, very few experiments address the issue of the provision of club goods, and no studies have specifically explored a field case. In this experiment, a membership fee is introduced to improve the successful...

Noting that Africa’s resource-rich countries have not translated their wealth into sustained economic growth and poverty reduction, this paper shows that by transferring a portion of resource-related government revenues uniformly and universally as direct payments to the population, some...

The paper discusses the economic effects of misallocation of public expenditures in favor of private goods rather than public goods. It first lays out certain key hypotheses regarding the consequences of the apparent public sector allocation inefficiency and the factors that explain this...

Results-based, collective action, value chain, and land tenure contracts are means to improve the management of agri-environmental public goods. The objective of this paper is to assess the understandability, applicability, and perceived economic benefit of each of these contract types by land...