The goal of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act was to end needy parents' dependence on governmental benefits, in part by promoting marriage. The prereform welfare system was widely believed to discourage marriage because it provided benefits primarily to single mothers. However, welfare reform may have actually decreased the incentives to be married by givi...

Modelling Charitable Donations to an Unexpected Natural Disaster: Evidence from the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics Using household-level data, we explore the relationship between donations to the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster and other charitable donations. The empirical evidence suggests that donations specifically for the victims of the tsunami are positively associat...

Cesarean section is an essential maternal healthcare service. Its role in labor and delivery care in low- and middle-income countries is complex; in many low-resource settings it is underutilized in the most needy of populations and overused by the less needy, without clear methods to ensure that universal access is available. Additionally, even if universal access were available, it is not evi...

Fleurbaey, Hagneré and Trannoy (2003) develop a bounded dominance test to make robust welfare comparisons, which is intermediate between Ebert’s (1999) cardinal dominance criterion –generalized Lorenz dominance applied to household incomes, divided and weighted by an equivalence scale– and Bourguignon’s (1989) ordinal dominance criterion. In this paper, we develop a more complete, but less robu...

Despite stringent and fine tuned laws most jurisdictions are not able to curb organ trafficking. Nor are they able to provide organs to the needy. There are reports of the kidnapping and murder of children and adults to "harvest" their organs. Millions of people are suffering, not because the organs are not available but because "morality" does not allow them to have access to the organs. Argum...

From its inception over two centuries ago, the Swaminarayan Sampradaya has emphasized interdependence of spirituality and service. BAPS Sanstha’s engagement in humanitarian services is a 200-year-old theological position established by Bhagwan to help his followers attain their soteriological goal ultimate liberation. Swaminarayan’s own compassionate service needy, coupled with teaching that ac...

Over a decade ago, an editorial in The Lancet voiced serious concern over the degree to which epidemiology had abandoned its traditional emphasis on issues of obvious importance to public health. Journal papers were increasingly occupied with refi ning statistical methods to address individual risk factors on a biological and molecular level. Appealing as the potential of molecular epidemiology...