Central governments or the international community at large are concerned about subnational service delivery. The design of targeted expenditure programs features frequently in central efforts to redistribute infrastructure and social spending or assure minimum standards. These programs are...

We analyze Engel curves for nuclear households in rural China. The sample includes more than 5000 nuclear families covering nineteen out of thirty Chinese provinces. We consider expenditures on food, also subdivided into several food subcategories such as cereals, or meat and fish, and other...

Most observed institutional arrangements, observed in governments, firms, and other organizations, acknowledge the effectiveness of imposing sanctioning institutions and monitoring policies to achieve particular goals. Nevertheless, less attention has been paid to the influences of the...

We use laboratory experiments to compare allocation rules in uniform price divisible good auctions. 'Standard' and 'uniform' allocation rules admit different types of low-price equilibria, which are eliminated by a 'hybrid' rule. We observe little evidence of revenue differences among the...

We characterize pure strategy equilibria of common value multi-unit uniform price auctions under the framework of initial public offerings, where bidders have incomplete private information regarding the value of shares and submit discrete demand schedules. We show that there exists a continuum...

We document gender differences in reactions to failure in the National College Entrance Exam, an extremely high-stakes exam that solely determines college admission outcomes for almost all teenagers in China. Using unique administrative data in Ningxia Province and a regression-discontinuity...

Many important decisions are taken according to weighted majority rule. Power indices predict that enlargement of the voting body may affect the balance of power between the original members even if their number of votes and the decision rule remain constant. Some of the existing voters may...

Central governments or the international community at large are concerned about subnational service delivery. The design of targeted expenditure programs features frequently in central efforts to redistribute infrastructure and social spending or assure minimum standards. These programs are...

Based on the expanding cavity model, a new expression of hardness has been proposed, which suggests that hardness is determined by the ratio of the radius of the characteristic surface r to the depth of indentation h ( r / h ). In combination with the experiment results and the finite element...