Using data covering over 100 birth-cohorts in 32 countries, we examine the shortand long-term effects of economic conditions on mortality. We find that small, but not large, booms increase contemporary mortality. Yet booms from birth to age 25, particularly those during adolescence, lower adult mortality. A simple model can rationalize these findings if economic conditions differentially affect...

Thieves, Thugs, and Neighborhood Poverty This paper develops a model of crime analyzing how such behavior is associated with individual and neighborhood poverty. The model shows that even under relatively minimal assumptions, a connection between individual poverty and both property and violent crimes will arise, and moreover, “neighborhood” effects can develop, but will differ substantially in...

Instability, proxied by individual level data on satisfaction, is measured, its association with inequality is investigated, and the socio-economic determinants of overall satisfaction are modelled. A very recent national representative household survey (2002) with a module designed to serve this purpose has been the statistics source of this study. The results point to the role of income growt...

From the literature on decentralization, it appears that the …scal vertical imbalance is somehow inherent to multi-level governments. Using a stylized model we show that this leads to a reduction in the extent of redistributive …scal policies if the maximal tolerable size of government has been reached. To test for this empirically we use some high quality data, from the LIS dataset, on individ...

Many developing countries use food price subsidies or price controls to improve the nutrition of the poor. However, subsidizing goods on which households spend a high proportion of their budget can create large wealth effects. Consumers may then substitute towards foods with higher non-nutritional attributes like taste, but lower nutritional content per unit currency, weakening or perhaps even ...

This paper examines the effects of performance incentives in a federal job training program for the economically disadvantaged. A natural experiment that exogenously varies the incentives that government workers face allows me to identify incentive responses, which I find are consistent with a simple model of organizational behavior. Additionally, I show that the program’s incentive designers h...

Intra-month cycles in household consumption and expenditure are considered hallmarks of dynamically inconsistent behavior. I find that Electronic Benefit Transfer reduced the severity of the these cycles for SNAP (food stamp) households with children and dual-parent households. The evidence suggests an explanation based on collective dynamic inconsistency – present bias generated by the aggrega...

Developing country governments often delegate authority over the targeting of antipoverty programs to community organizations, while retaining control over how much goes to each community. We offer a theoretical characterization of the information structure in such programs and the interconnected behavior of the various players. Our model motivates an econometric specification for explaining di...

Heavily subsidizing essential health products through existing health infrastructure could substantially improve health in sub-Saharan Africa. There is, however, widespread concern that poor governance – in particular, limited health worker accountability – seriously undermines the effectiveness of subsidy programs. Using innovative audits of targeted bed net distribution programs in Ghana, Ken...