Public Action for Public Goods

Working Paper No. 12911 This paper focuses on the relationship between public action and access to public goods. It begins by developing a simple model of collective action which is intended to capture the various mechanisms that are discussed in the theoretical literature on collective action. We a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:NBER Working Paper Series 2007-02, p.12911
Main Authors: Banerjee, Abhijit, Iyer, Lakshmi, Somanathan, Rohini
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Access to education
Collective action
Economic reform
Economic theory
Education
Infrastructure
Polls & surveys
Regions
Schools
Voter behavior
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Summary:Working Paper No. 12911 This paper focuses on the relationship between public action and access to public goods. It begins by developing a simple model of collective action which is intended to capture the various mechanisms that are discussed in the theoretical literature on collective action. We argue that several of these intuitive theoretical arguments rely on special additional assumptions that are often not made clear. We then review the empirical work based on the predictions of these models of collective action. While the available evidence is generally consistent with these theories, there is a dearth of quality evidence. Moreover, a large part of the variation in access to public goods seems to have nothing to do with the "bottom-up" forces highlighted in these models and instead reflect more "top-down" interventions. We conclude with a discussion of some of the historical evidence on top-down interventions.
ISSN:0898-2937
DOI:10.3386/w12911