Government spending should be regarded as a social and political phenomenon, not merely as a technical choice. We argue that there is an implicit contract between the organized elites and politicians which often leads to a pro-elite allocation of public resources. A natural and simple taxonomy...

Cost-benefit analyses of health and safety regulations require estimates of the benefits of reducing pollution, and hence the risks of pollution-caused illnesses. Lost work income constitutes an important component of monetized benefits. This paper examines the impact of married men and...

We show that the tax system in Chile is insufficient, inefficient and inequitable. Insufficient because it does not yield enough revenues for the state to promote human capital development and to face poverty in a more comprehensive way; inefficient because it is highly unbalanced causing most...

This paper reports results from a field experiment in Uganda. The proportion of children five years and younger who slept under a mosquito net was 20 percent higher when nets were distributed for free compared to when an equivalent cash transfer could be used to purchase nets. This effect is...

Many doctors in developing countries provide considerably lower levels of quality to their patients than they have been trained to provide. The gap between best practice and actual performance is difficult to measure for individual doctors who differ in levels of training and experience and who...

We examine the implications of health seeking behavior on access to quality health care using a unique dataset that combines a household survey from rural Tanzania with the location and quality of all health facilities available to households. Patients do not always visit the nearest facility,...

We examine data from rural Arusha region in Tanzania in which households are asked to recall the illness episodes of randomly chosen other households in their village. We analyze the probability that a household would be able to recall another illness episode as a function of the characteristics...