Since the liberalization of India's economy beginning in the early 1990's, the government has increasingly employed contract workers to perform various state functions, including in the education sector. Yet, little research has been done to examine how courts have reacted to this shift in...

Little evidence is available on whether changing global rules so as to promote human rights can enhance development outcomes. The Convention on the Rights of the Child was almost universally ratified by the mid-1990s, but it is unclear whether treaty ratification was associated with better or...

This paper develops a framework and some hypotheses regarding the impact of local-level, informal legal institutions on three economic outcomes: aggregate growth, inequality, and human capabilities. It presents a set of stylized differences between formal and informal legal justice systems,...

Public interest litigation has historically been an innovative judicial procedure for enhancing the social and economic rights of disadvantaged and marginalized groups in India. In recent years, however, a number of criticisms of public interest litigation have emerged, including concerns...

Although the decisions of policy professionals are often more consequential than those of individuals in their private capacity, there is a dearth of studies on the biases of policy professionals: those who prepare and implement policy on behalf of elected politicians. Experiments conducted on a...

Over the past two decades, debate over the whys, the hows, and the effects of the ever-expanding phenomenon of right-to-health litigation ('judicialization’) throughout Latin America have been marked by polarized arguments and limited information. In contrast to claims of judicialization as a...

Women's labor force participation in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq is very low, at 14 percent. This paper investigates a number of social and psychological barriers to participation, using recent methods in the measurement of social norms and cultural beliefs and primary data collected from all...

Women's labor force participation in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq is very low, at 14 percent. This paper investigates a number of social and psychological barriers to participation, using recent methods in the measurement of social norms and cultural beliefs and primary data collected from all...

The determinants of compliance with human rights treaties likely vary according to the right in question, yet heterogeneity in the pathways through which ratification affects various human rights outcomes has received limited attention. This paper first develops an account of treaty compliance...

Declines in rates of child stunting in the Philippines have decelerated, making it hard for the country to achieve its targets on nutritional outcomes. The knowledge base, beliefs, and practices of caregivers have been extensively researched, but little is known about how health workers and...