A large-scale economic experiment, conducted on a representative sample of the US population, shows that cooperation creates special moral obligations. Participants in the experiment, acting as impartial spectators, transferred significantly more money to an unlucky worker when two individuals...

Bureaucratic performance is a crucial determinant of economic growth. Little is known about how to improve it in resource-constrained settings. This study describes a field trial of a social recognition intervention to improve record keeping in clinics in two Nigerian states, replicating the...

A large-scale economic experiment, conducted on a representative sample of the US popula- tion, shows that cooperation creates special moral obligations. Participants in the experiment, acting as impartial spectators, transferred significantly more money to an unlucky worker when two individuals...

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...

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...

The author analyzes contemporary rights-based and economic approaches to health care and education in developing countries. He assesses the foundations and uses of social rights in development, outlines an economic approach to improving health and education services, and then highlights the...

This paper assesses the extent to which provider payment mechanisms can help developing countries address their leading health care problems. It first identifies four key problems in the health care systems in developing countries: 1) public facilities, which provide the bulk of secondary and...

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) play an increasingly important role in development assistance, but little systematic evidence is available about their objectives and choices in developing countries. The authors develop two stylized accounts of NGO motivation: one in which donor contracts...