What motivates individuals to become politicians? This is an important question in decentralized democracies, where local politicians play a key role in public goods provision. However, and in emerging economies, bureaucratic hurdles and administrative failures introduce uncertainty about the...

Limited attention has been paid to how well social mobility measures debated and used to study industrial countries perform in analysis of low-income settings. Following brief, selective reviews of the axiomatic and econometric literatures, three mobility concepts illustrate how properties that...

Michael Clemens' recent working paper "The Meaning of Failed Replications: A Review and Proposal" echoes concerns expressed by some replicatees and economists more generally about the potentially damaging effects of a claim of failed replication on reputations (or similar concerns in social...

There exist large variations in juvenile sex ratios across districts and social groups in India. Economic and cultural factors have been advanced as contending explanations for these variations. We propose a household optimization model that integrates cultural explanations with economic ones....