This paper examines the relationship between community participation and theefficacy of interventions designed to reduce poverty. We develop some simple analyticsthat are used to structure a review of the extant literature and motivate the analysis of theimpact of participation on the efficacy...

This paper uses a unique data set on more than 600,000 mortgage contracts to estimate a credit supply function which allows for risk-heterogeneity. Non-linearity is modelled using quantile regressions. We propose an instrumental variable approach in which changes in the tax treatment of housing...

This paper uses mortgage data to construct a measure of terms on which households access to external finance, and relates it to consumption at both the aggregate and cohort levels. The Household External Finance (HEF) index is based on the spread paid by risky borrowers in the mortgage market....

This paper studies the implications of perceived default risk for aggregate output and productivity. Using a model of credit contracts with moral hazard, we show that a firm's probability of default is a sufficient statistic for capital allocation. The theoretical framework suggests an aggregate...

This paper explores the link between trust in government, policy-making, and compliance. It focuses on a specific channel whereby citizens who are convinced that a policy is worthwhile are more motivated to comply with it. This in turn reduces the government's cost of implementing a policy and...

Governments in liberal democracies pursue social welfare, but in many different ways. The wellbeing approach instead asks: Why not focus directly on increasing measured human happiness? Why not try to improve people's overall quality of life, as it is subjectively seen by citizens themselves?...

This paper estimates the size of the media multiplier, a model-based measure of how far media coverage magnifies the economic response to shocks. We combine monthly aggregated and anonymized credit card activity data from 114 card issuing countries in 5 destination countries with a large corpus...

This paper uses household data from India to examine the economic and social status of village politicians, and how individual and village characteristics affect politician behavior while in office. Education increases the chances of selection to public office and reduces the odds that a...

We formulate a model to explain why the lack of political competition may stifle economic performance and use the United States as a testing ground for the model’s predictions, exploiting the 1965 Voting Rights Act which helped break the near monpoly on political power of the Democrats in...

With public services such as health and education, it is not straightforward for consumers to assess the quality of provision. Many such services are provided by monopoly not-for-profit providers and there is concern that for-profit providers may increase profit at the expense of quality. This...