Culture as reflected in social and religious norms may be pivotal to social organization in a decentralised economy where local authorities are responsible for the provision of local public goods. We distinguish between individualist and collectivist cultures to argue that collectivist culture...

Using data from the Indonesian Family Life Surveys, this paper studies the impact of fiscal decentralisation in Indonesia on local public spending across communities with different types of local institutions. Our results provide evidence of heterogeneity in access to public goods across...

Primary enrolment rates are very high in Peru, but so are the failure and drop-out rates. Thus an understanding of the nature of child schooling should consider school progression from primary to secondary and higher levels, taking account of the conditional sequence with the previous level and...

Given the intrinsically sequential nature of child birth, timing of a child’s birth has consequences not only for itself, but also for the older and younger siblings. The paper thus argues that prior and posterior spacing between consecutive siblings are important measures of the intensity of...

Little is known about the living conditions of a growing number of elderly in India who predominantly coreside with their children. Mutual sharing of responsibilities is important in coresidency arrangements involving exchange of financial and other services between the elderly and their...

The present paper empirically examines the effects of ownership structure on capital structure and firm valuation in four East Asian countries worst affected by the last Crisis. In doing so, we distinguish ownership from both control and management and also allow for the simultaneity between...

Current evidence on the relationships between growth and inequality is predominantly based on cross-country data sets or panel data sets covering a small number of time periods. But these relationships, being fundamentally dynamic in nature, need to be considered over a much longer time horizon....

Primary enrolment rates are very high in Peru, but so are the failure and drop-out rates, especially beyond the primary level. Thus an analysis of child schooling should take account of the conditional sequence with the previous level and self-selection into the next higher level of schooling....

In the absence of any official measures of old age poverty, this paper uses National Sample Survey household-level data to investigate the extent and nature of living standards and incidence of poverty among elderly in sixteen major states in India. We construct both individual and...