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Publications (189)
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
When seeking to increase their tax revenues, policy-makers face a likely tradeoff between decreasing personal income tax rates (making formalizing more attractive and potentially contributing to revenue) and alternatively raising tax rates (potentially slowing down the formalization of the economy...
Journal Article
We design a lab-in-the-field experiment involving naturally occurring groups operating in three South-African townships. We introduce an incentives-based mechanism named 'participatory incentives' consisting of monetary incentives that are awarded conditional on the group reaching a threshold of...
– Diversity in Development
NOW IN PAPERBACK WITH REVISED PREFACE | Gunnar Myrdal published his magnum opus Asian Drama, in 1968, to conclude that Asia's development prospects were gloomy. Since then, contrary to Myrdal's expectations Asia has been transformed beyond recognition, the development of nations and living standards...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that involving beneficiaries in charity decision-making ensures better governance processes. This study provides the first experimental test of the effects of beneficiaries’ participation in the decision of how to spend a charity's funds. We consider four different...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Equality of opportunity versus welfarism
A common claim in the policy discourse is that a government wishing to achieve equality of opportunity should use public provision of education for equalisation of opportunities rather than income taxation, which only equalizes incomes. We develop a framework in which the tax and education provision...
Journal Article
– Evidence from China
We investigate heterogeneous and nonlinear intergenerational transmission of education and the impact on this of house prices. Using the China Household Finance Survey, we construct household history of property pur-chases and educational investment over the past 16 years with current filial...
Journal Article
– Mandated political representation and murders
This study provides the first country-wide research evidence that an affirmative action policy may induce a backlash. I exploit the timing of the implementation of castebased electoral quotas across and within the states of India. The results show that the implementation of the electoral quotas...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Evidence from the Han and ethnic minorities in China
This study investigates the unexpected impact that enforcing birth control policies in China has upon the educational stratification between the Han majority, the policy target group, and ethnic minorities, a partially excluded group. Exploring county-level variation in the value of fines levied for...
The transformation of Asia’s education and health systems over the last 50 years has been breathtaking and unprecedented in human history. There are some central features of this transformation that clearly stand out. Over the last 50 years, all Asian countries have been able to expand citizen...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Method and Evidence from Micro-Data
This study uses a global dataset with information about 210,000 corporations in 142 countries to investigate whether tax avoidance by multinational firms is more prevalent in less-developed countries. The paper proposes a novel approach to studying cross-border profit shifting, which has relatively...
Over the last 50 years, Asia has emerged as the most important laboratory for understanding the roots of state effectiveness and the consequences of different modes of state action for delivering enhanced wellbeing. While in the mid-twentieth century social science researchers were focused on...
– Five key issues and solutions
Taxation, and public sector matters more generally, are high on the agenda for the international development community. This is clearly reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDG17 stipulates the need for improving domestic resource mobilization directly, and most of the other SDGs...
– Example from Malawi
Social assistance programmes have proliferated across Africa alongside redemocratization — the return of multi-party systems with regular, competitive elections. Competitive elections in Africa can provide an incentive to welfare policy reform because they push presidential candidates and political...
– FP2P Podcast and transcript
Duncan Green: I recently skyped Deepak Nayyar, Professor of Economics at India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) to discuss his new book, Resurgent Asia. From Poverty to Power · Deepak Nayyar Podcast You start with an economist called Gunnar Myrdal, who 50 years ago wrote a book saying that Asia...
The Rwandan government introduced the Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme (VUP) with donor support in 2008. The VUP comprises public works, unconditional direct support for those unable to work, and a financial services component that promotes financial literacy and provides credit. This new elite...
Journal Article
We implement a lab-in-the-field experiment among childcare workers in Chandigarh, India, to evaluate discriminatory attitudes of the Hindu workers toward Muslim children. We use a third-party allocation game that controls for selfish payoff-maximizing preferences across the treatments and focus...
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