Scholars and policymakers increasingly recognize the value of social capital - the connections that generate and enable trust among people - in responding to and recovering from shocks and disasters. However, some communities have more social infrastructure, that is, sites that produce and...

This paper studies the effect of exogenous demand shocks on supply of schools in a market with both private and public schools. Using an all India school level panel constructed from an administrative dataset, we show that negative rainfall shocks increase the likelihood of private school...

The budget contained an announcement that the central government would actively explore the option of using an appropriate form of the ‘food stamps’ or an alternative scheme to improve the efficacy and reduce the cost of the current system of administration of food subsidies. The...

We use data for 436 rural districts from the 2001 Census of India to examine whether different aspects of social divisions help explain the wide variation in access to tap water across rural India. Studies linking social fragmentation to public goods usually aggregate different types of...

In times of ever-rising health expenditures it is becoming more and more obvious that conventional models for funding health care are increasingly experiencing difficulties in meeting up this challenge. The concept of Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs) represents an innovative and so far rarely...

Das Konzept der Medical Savings Accounts als Instrument zur Finanzierung von Gesundheitssystemen hat in den letzten Jahren international Aufmerksamkeit erregt. In Deutschland wurde ein ähnliches Konzept für die Gesetzliche Rentenversicherung im Rahmen der Riester Rente diskutiert. Länder wie...

Angesichts steigender Gesundheitsausgaben spielen Gesundheitssystemvergleiche in den letzten Jahren eine immer größere Rolle. Solche Benchmarks können sinnvolle Anregungen zur Verbesserung von Gesundheitssystemen darstellen. Viele Gesundheitssystemvergleiche unterstellen implizit ein...

Lack of access to finance is often cited as a key reason for why poor people remain poor. This paper uses data on the Indian rural branch expansion program to provide empirical evidence on this issue. Between 1977 and 1990, the Indian central bank mandated that a commercial bank can open a...

This paper proposes a new welfare criterion which satisfies three desiderata: strong sensitivity to the least advantaged, sensitivity to the present, and sensitivity to the future. We develop necessary conditions for optimal paths under this new criterion, and demonstrate that, in a familiar...

The Erie Canal was a mammoth public works project undertaken largely because the scope of the investment was beyond what a private firm could manage during the early 19th century. As with most public works, there were ample opportunities for public officials to realize private gains from the...