This article examines rationales for public intervention in health insurance markets from the perspective of public economics. It draws on the literature of organizational design to examine alternative public intervention strategies, including issues of contracting, purchaser provider splits,...

Aid conditionality forces countries to adopt policies that they would not otherwise choose. We examine how government discretion should be so constrained when the donor cannot fully control public expenditures, but instead can influence a less disaggregated indicator of public policy, namely the...

This paper studies the evolution of political institutions in the face of conflict. We examine institutional reform in a class of "pivotal mechanisms"-institutions that behave "as if" the resulting policy were determined by a "pivotal" decision maker drawn from the potential population of...

In economies with weak enforcement of traffic regulations, drivers who adopt excessively risky behavior impose externalities on other vehicles, and on their own passengers. In light of the difficulties of correcting inter-vehicle externalities associated with weak third-party enforcement, this...