A common justification for HOPE-style merit-aid programs is to promote and reward academic achievement, thereby inducing greater investments in human capital. However, grade-based eligibility and retention rules encourage other behavioral responses. Using data extracted from the longitudinal...

In the last fifteen years there has been a significant increase in merit aid. Coincident with this increase in merit aid has been increased attention to sorting in various aspects of life, especially in education. This paper examines the extent to which merit-based aid exacerbates or ameliorates...

Since Georgia unveiled its HOPE Scholarship in 1993, at least 15 other states have implemented or proposed merit-aid programs based on the HOPE model. A common justification for these actions is to promote and reward academic achievement, thereby inducing greater investments in human capital....

This article examines the relationship among access to drinking water, sanitation facilities and health outcomes for children in India. We use the NFHS 2005-2006 household-level survey data to construct the nutritional distribution for two anthropometric health measures for children between ages...

We use data for 436 rural districts from the 2001 Census of India to examine whether different aspects of social divisions help explain the wide variation in access to tap water across rural India. Studies linking social fragmentation to public goods usually aggregate different types of...

The relationship between crime and labor market conditions is typically studied by looking at the unemployment rate. In contrast, this paper argues that wages are a better measure of labor market conditions than the unemployment rate. As the wages of those most likely to commit crime (unskilled...

The labor market prospects of young, unskilled men fell dramatically in the 1980s and improved in the 1990s. Crime rates show a reverse pattern: increasing during the 1980s and falling in the 1990s. Since young, unskilled men commit most crime, this paper seeks to establish a causal relationship...

Casino gaming - providing negative expected return with positive variance - has puzzled economists with respect to a number of issues, including the extent to which casinos are tied to externalities. In the case of tobacco, the link between use and health-related externalities has led to state...

Recently many papers have used the arrest rate to measure punishments in crime-rate regressions. However, arrest rates account for only a portion of the criminal sanction. Conviction rates and time served are theoretically important, but rarely used, and excluding them generates omitted variable...