Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Can private sector participation (PSP) in the piped water sector improve child health? I use child-level data from 39 African countries during 1986-2010 to show that PSP decreases diarrhea among urban-dwelling, under-five children by 2.6 percentage points, or 16% of its mean prevalence. Children from the poorest households benefit most. PSP is also associated with a 7.8 percentage point increase in school attendance of 7-17 year olds. Importantly, PSP increases usage of piped water by 9.7 percentage points, suggesting a possible causal channel explaining health improvements. To attribute causality, I exploit time-variation in the private water market share controlled by …

What drives governments with similar revenues to provide very different amounts of goods with private sector substitutes? Education is a prime example. I use exogenous shocks to Brazilian municipalities' revenue during 1995-2008 generated by non-linearities in federal transfer laws to demonstrate two things. First, municipalities with higher income inequality or higher median income allocate less of a revenue shock to education and are less likely to expand public school enrollment. They are more likely to invest in public infrastructure that is broadly enjoyed, like parks and roads, or to save the shock. Second, I find no evidence that the quality …

This paper exploits exogenous variation in the natural topography of the United States to estimate the causal impact of inter-jurisdictional competition on income growth. We find that doubling the number of county governments in a metropolitan area leads to a 17% increase in the average annual growth rate of earnings per employee over 1969-2006, and a 10% increase in 2006 income per employee. Decomposing income effects using 2000 Census worker-level data, we find that approximately half of the effect stems from making workers more productive, while the other half comes from changing the composition of the workforce and inducing workers …