We test the causal role of social capital, as measured by self-reported trust, in determining access to basic health facilities in Sub-Saharan Africa. To skirt reverse-causality problems between social capital and basic health, we rely on instrumental variable (IV) estimates. The results show...

The ability to produce local public goods and services such as sharing savings, risk, insurance, sanitation and educational services, is a key fator for development. This ability, however, varies greatly across communities (Ostrom 1990 ; Khwaja 2009). Considering that this ability depends...

Le 12 octobre 2009 Elinor Ostrom recevait le Prix Nobel d'économie pour sa contribution à l'analyse des biens collectifs. Cet article se propose de dresser un panorama de ses travaux. Nous commencerons par retracer l'itinéraire académique et professionnel d'Ostrom. Dans une deuxième partie,...

Le 12 octobre 2009 Elinor Ostrom recevait le Prix Nobel d'économie pour sa contribution à l'analyse des biens collectifs. Cet article se propose de dresser un panorama de ses travaux. Nous commencerons par retracer l'itinéraire académique et professionnel d'Ostrom. Dans une deuxième partie,...

<alinea/> On October 12th, 2009 Elinor Ostrom received the Nobel Prize in Economics for her analysis of the commons. This article presents a survey of her work. We shall begin by redrawing the academic route of Ostrom. In the second part, we show how she successively used various methods of...

The ability to produce local public goods and services such as sharing savings, risk, insurance, sanitation and educational services, is a key fator for development. This ability, however, varies greatly across communities (Ostrom 1990 ; Khwaja 2009). Considering that this ability depends...

This paper attempts an empirical examination of the interaction between corruption, political instability and the mortality rate, as well as their transmission mechanisms in Sub-Saharan Africa. We use panel VAR techniques to test the causality and the cointegration between these three variables...

Because of limited governmental resources, communities in Africa often rely on collective action to provide basic public goods such as schools. What drives the ability of communities to produce better schools? Two important lines of research shaped our understanding of the ability of communities...

In this paper, we extend the problem of decentralization of Pareto optima in an economy with production externalities to the case where the production capacities upon which Pareto optimality is defined may differ from the aggregate of the firms expectations about their production possibilities....