BREAD Working Paper No. 615, December 2022

The Economics of Women’s Rights Michèle Tertilt, Anne Hannusch, Matthias Doepke and Laura Montenbruck   Abstract Two centuries ago, in most countries around the world, women were unable to vote, had no say over their own children or property, and could not obtain a divorce. Women have gradually gained rights in many areas of life, […]

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. 509, April 2017

Decentralization and Efficiency of Subsidy Targeting: Evidence from Chiefs in Rural Malawi Pia Basurto, Pascaline Dupas, Jonathan Robinson Abstract Developing countries spend vast sums on subsidies. Beneficiaries are typically se- lected via either a proxy-means test (PMT) or through a decentralized identification process led by local leaders. A decentralized allocation may offer informational ad- vantages, […]

BREAD Working Paper No. 526, November 2017

The Rise and Fall of Local Elections in China: Theory and Empirical Evidence on the Autocrat’s Trade-off Monica Martinez-Bravo, Gerard Padró i Miquel, Nancy Qian, Yang Yao Abstract We propose a simple informational theory to explain why autocratic regimes introduce lo- cal elections. Because citizens have better information on local officials than the distant central […]

BREAD Working Paper No. 572, March 2020

How Political Insiders Lose Out When International Aid Underperforms: Evidence from a Participatory Development Experiment in Ghana Kate Baldwin, Dean Karlan, Christopher Udry, Ernest Appiah Abstract Participatory development is designed to mitigate problems of political bias in pre-existing local government but also interacts with it in complex ways. Using a five-year randomized controlled study in […]