Public action to prevent crime is often driven by concerns about public safety. But what generates those concerns ? ]s it crime, or something else ? Using survey data for Brazil, we find that the desire for greater public safety has a positive own-income effect, but a negative neighborhood-...

On the basis of the baseline data collected for the evaluation of the Bolivian Social Investment Fund (SIF) this paper assesses (1) the benefit incidence of the SIF and (2) the quality of the evaluation design. We find that the benefits in education are most equally distributed over the...

This study explores global inequality in health status, and decomposes it into within- and between-country inequality. We rely on standardized height indicators as our health indicator since they avoid the measurement pitfalls of more traditional measures of health such as morbidity, mortality...

Every three years, Indonesia fields simultaneously two nationwide surveys which collect consumption data. One collects consumption using 23 questions, the other using 320 questions. Based on a repeated experiment in which the two questionnaires were randomly assigned across households, I examine...

The Indonesian Healthcard program was implemented in response to the economic crisis, which hit Indonesia in 1998, in order to preserve access to health care services for the poor. The Healthcard provided the households with subsidised care at public health care providers, while the providers...

This study evaluates the effect of four randomized interventions aimed at strengthening school committees, and subsequently improving learning outcomes, in public primary schools in Indonesia. All study schools were randomly allocated to either a control group receiving no intervention, or to...

Using a panel dataset of 320 Indonesian districts we examine the impact of district budgets on public health spending, utilization patters in the public and private sector, and private health spending in the four years after decentralization. We exploit the panel structure of the data and the...