What drives governments with similar revenues to publicly provide very different amounts of goods for which private substitutes are available? Key examples are education and health care. This paper compares spending by Brazilian municipalities on pre-primary education---a good that is also...

This article discusses the potential of private sector participation (PSP) to improve the urban water supply in South Asia. I first provide background on the literature linking a safe and adequate water supply with malnutrition, morbidity, and mortality. To better understand the selection...

The migrant selection literature concentrates primarily on spatial patterns. This paper illustrates the implications of migration duration for patterns of selection by integrating two workhorses of the labor literature, a search model and a Roy model. Theory and empirics show temporary migrants...

Internal migration has the potential to substantially increase income, especially for the poor in developing countries, and yet migration rates remain low. We explore the role of psychic costs by evaluating the impacts of internal migration on a suite of well-being indicators using a unique,...