Urban peripheries in many developing countries lack basic local public goods like street pavement, water, sewerage and electricity. We design an experiment of street pavement provision in a Mexican urban area and estimate impacts on a set of indicators obtained from a household survey. Our...

Recent work suggests that consumers respond differently to taxes that are included in a good’s posted price and taxes that are added upon checking out at the register. This paper investigates how the government’s choice between these posted and register taxes affects the distribution of a...

Two major theories structure debates on the relationship between socioeconomic status and aesthetic tastes. The distinction hypothesis, developed by French scholars with French data, claims that high-status people with highbrow tastes shun popular culture. The “omnivores” hypothesis,...

We examine the willingness of health care consumers to pay formal fees for health care use and how this willingness to pay is associated with past informal payments. We use data from a survey carried out in Hungary in 2010 among a representative sample of 1,037 respondents. The contingent...

This paper reports results of an evaluation experiment designed to provide both hedonic scores and measurements of consumer willingness to pay (WTP), on the basis of visual inspection, tasting, and presentation of information on origin, ingredients, and production processes of typical kinds of...

This paper proposes a joint model of tobacco consumption and mortality over the life-cycle. The decision to smoke is a trade off between current utility derived from smoking and a mortality risk increasing with age. Individuals with a longer potential life expectancy have more incentive to cut...

Prices of real and financial assets fell substantially in the UK during 2008–09. The fourth wave of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) was in the field throughout this ‘financial crisis’. We use these data and earlier ELSA waves first to document the effect of...

This paper outlines the characteristics and determinants of Puerto Rican female entrepreneurs in 2007. This study utilizes data from the Adult Population Survey (APS) for 2007 from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Project. We find that female entrepreneurs in Puerto Rico are most likely...

Measuring sustainable development based on analytical models of growth and development and modern methods of growth accounting is an economic approach—often called the capital approach – to establishing sustainable development indicators (SDIs). Ecological approaches may be...

A lot can be learned from the numerous pitfalls of sustainable development implementation: they outline how collective representation, short term interests and balance of power can undermine sustainability. For instance, the usefulness of global institutions in dealing with sustainable...