There have been competing arguments about the effect of public infrastructure on productivity in the literature. Level-based regressions generally show a much higher return to public capital than private capital, while difference-based regressions tend to find insignificant or even negative...

Xi Chen acknowledges generous Doctoral Research Grant from the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University and precious data set provided by the Development Strategy and Governance Division at IFPRI. Conference Travel Grant provided by the Department of Applied Economics and...

Since the early nineties, tens of thousands of villages have held elections of their leaders in rural China. Using a recent village survey, this paper empirically examines the impact of election on public goods provision to the rural community. We found that elected officials tend to tax less on...

This paper is based on our ongoing joint work with Ravi Kanbur. Xi Chen is grateful to Ravi Kanbur for invaluable comments, guidance and encouragement. For comments and suggestions, please direct correspondence to Xi Chen at xc49@cornell.edu.

What explains the spectacular increases in inequality of disposable income in transitional economies of Central and Eastern Europe? There are at least two possible explanations. First, the pre-tax distribution of income became more unequal because of the shift to a market economy. Second, the...

This paper introduces a significant new multi-disciplinary collection of studies of poverty dynamics, presenting the reader with the latest thinking by a group of researchers who are leaders in their respective disciplines. It argues that there are three main fronts on which progress must be...

This paper establishes and explores the implications of a somewhat surprising empirical finding. Although civil war adversely affects the performance of social indicators in general, poorer countries lose less, in absolute and relative terms, than richer countries. It is argued that the...

In the empirical literature on minimum wage enforcement, the standard approach is to measure the number of violations, not their depth. In this paper we present a family of violation indices which, by analogy with poverty indices, can emphasize the depth of violation to different degrees. The...