Why do People Stay Poor? Clare Balboni, Oriana Bandiera, Robin Burgess, Maitreesh Ghatak and Anton Heil Abstract There are two broad views as to why people stay poor. One emphasizes differences in fundamentals, such as ability, talent or motivation. The other, the poverty traps view, differences in opportunities which stem from access to wealth. […]
EC 307: Development Economics at the LSE
EC 307: Development Economics London School of Economics LT Syllabus 2021 Robin Burgess Course description Lectures in LT will cover three broad topics. The first part will analyse the role of state and how government can be made accountable to its citizens. This will involve us looking at the political economy of development which […]
BREAD Working Paper No. 557, December 2018
Social Proximity and Bureaucrat Performance: Evidence from India Guo Xu, Marianne Bertrand, Robin Burgess Abstract Using exogenous variation in social proximity generated by an allocation rule, we find that bureaucrats assigned to their home states are perceived to be more corrupt and less able to withstand illegitimate political pressure. Despite this, we observe that home […]