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Rural electrification can have many benefits-not only bringing lighting, but improving the quality of health care, spreading information and supporting productive enterprises. The extent of these benefits has been questioned, arguing that they may be insufficient to justify the investment costs. This book quantifies these benefits. It finds that the benefits can indeed be high, substantially outweighing the costs, and that consumer willingness to pay is generally sufficient to achieve financial sustainability. However, benefits could be increased further by providing smart subsidies to assist connections for poorer households, promote productive uses and further consumer education.

Objectives. To examine public support for health insurance, income support, and unemployment policies during the initial phase of disease transmission and economic distress following the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak and to assess varying public support based on beliefs about the role of government. Methods. We fielded a nationally representative survey of US adults (n = 1468) from April 7, 2020, to April 13, 2020. Results. Of US adults, 77% supported paid sick leave, and a majority also supported universal health insurance, an increased minimum wage, and various unemployment support policies. Public support for an active government role in society to improve citizens’ lives increased by 10 percentage points during this initial pandemic response relative to September 2019. Belief in a strong governmental role in society was associated with greater support for social safety-net policies. Conclusions. During the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in early April 2020, most US adults favored a range of safety-net policies to ameliorate its negative health and economic consequences. For most safety-net policies, public support was highest among those favoring a stronger governmental role in society.

Since modern welfare reform began in the 1980s, we have seen low-income parents leave the welfare rolls and join the workforce in large numbers. At the same time, the Earned Income Tax Credit has offered a monetary incentive for low-income parents to work. Thus, unlike some of the other two-generation mechanisms discussed in this issue of Future of Children, policies that encourage low-income parents to work are both widespread and well-entrenched in the United States. But parents' (and especially mothers') work, writes Carolyn Heinrich, is not unambiguously beneficial for their children. On the one hand, working parents can be positive role models for their children, and, of course, the income they earn can improve their children's lives in many ways. On the other hand, work can impair the developing bond between parents and young children, especially when the parents work long hours or evening and night shifts. The stress that parents bring home from their jobs can detract from their parenting skills, undermine the atmosphere in the home, and thereby introduce stress into children's lives. Unfortunately, it is low-income parents who are most likely to work in stressful, low-quality jobs that feature low pay, little autonomy, inflexible hours, and few or no benefits. And low-income children whose parents are working are more likely to be placed in inadequate child care or to go unsupervised. Two-generation approaches, Heinrich writes, could maximize the benefits and minimize the detriments of parents' work by expanding workplace flexibility, and especially by mandating enough paid leave so that mothers can breastfeed and form close bonds with their infants; by helping parents place their children in high-quality child care; and by helping low-income parents train for, find, and keep a well-paying job with benefits.

The distribution of funds becomes the identity and function of banks. By performing this function well, the banks can get profit to survive. One of the considered factors affecting this channeling function is the issuance of government bonds to finance the state budget, which may be harmful to this bank channeling function. Therefore, to prove this situation, it is necessary to check a causal relationship between the government bond value and the bank intermediary function through this study, adding bank size and loans as a control variable. This study utilizes the banks listed on the capital market of Indonesia as the population. Furthermore, the Slovin formula and a simple random sampling method are employed to determine the number of banks to be the samples and take them. Also, the regression model with pooled data and the t-statistic test are used to estimate its coefficients and examine the proposed hypotheses, respectively. Overall, this study demonstrates that the government bond value positively affects the bank intermediary function. This indicates that the crowding-out does not exist. By this evidence, the government does not need to worry because this debt does not disturb the bank function to deliver the credit to society. Likewise, bank size and bad loans have a positive impact on this function. Thus, banks must be able to diversify risks among their assets and restructure bad loans when performing this function.

Chapter 1 investigates asks the question how do financial frictions affect the type of human capital investments that students make in college? To study this question, I build a novel dataset covering more than 700,000 U.S. students, merging commencement records with address histories, credit bureau records, and professional resumes. I document that students trade off initial earnings against lifetime earnings when choosing college majors and that students from low-income families are more likely to choose majors associated with higher initial earnings but lower lifetime earnings. I provide causal estimates of how student debt affects this trade-off using the staggered implementation of universal no-loan policies across 22 universities from2001 to 2019. I find that students who are required to take on more student loans to finance their education choose majors with higher initial earnings but lower lifetime earnings. Furthermore, student debt affects students differentially depending on their family backgrounds: Students from low-income families display greater sensitivity to changes in student debt. Finally, I show that differences in student debt amounts lead to different job profiles and earnings later in life. Combined, these findings highlight the role of financial frictions in human capital investments and subsequent labor market trajectories. Chapter 2 asks what role do social connections play in women's career advancement. Women continue to be underrepresented in corporate leadership positions. We investigate whether access to a larger share of female peers in business school affects the gender gap in senior managerial positions. Merging administrative data from a top-10 US business school with public LinkedIn profiles, we first document that female MBAs are 24 percent less likely than male MBAs to enter senior management within 15 years of graduation. Next, we use the exogenous assignment of students into sections to show that a larger proportion of female MBA section peers increases the likelihood of entering senior management for women but not for men. This effect is driven by female-friendly firms, such as those with more generous maternity leave policies and greater work schedule flexibility. A larger proportion of female MBA peers induces women to transition to these firms where they attain senior management roles. We find suggestive evidence that some of the mechanisms behind these results include job referrals and gender-specific information transmission. These findings highlight the role of social connections in reducing the gender gap in senior management positions. Chapter 3 asks how should regulators evaluate the costs and benefits when firms require consumers to provide additional data? Using a model of asymmetric information in non-Walrasian markets, we show that consumer surplus can increase, even when more data leads to higher average prices. We test the model's predictions in mortgage markets using the staggered implementation of Automated Underwriting Systems in the 1990s, where new credit risk models increased the use of and interaction between additional financial variables. We find that average interest rates went up in line with the model's predictions. However, the effects are driven by increased credit supply on the extensive margin, benefiting marginal borrowers from groups historically excluded from credit markets. Our results challenge the standard regulatory approach of relying on prices as a sufficient statistic for consumer surplus.

The California State University (CSU) Chancellor's Office reached an agreement with all CSU collective bargaining units and Employee Relations on a uniform Catastrophic (CAT) Leave Donation Program in 1992. The CAT Leave Donation Program allows employees to donate sick and/or vacation leave credits to employees who are incapacitated due to a catastrophic illness or injury and have exhausted all of their own leave credits. This also extends to employees with whom family illnesses are deemed catastrophic, thus requiring the employee to care for an immediate family member. Stakeholders include union represented employees who accrue leave credits as well as any employee who receives or donates hours of leave credits in the program. Other stakeholders include the family members and program administrators.

Corruption is motivated by the possibility of securing something of value for oneself and ones allies. The desire to secure benefits is a human trait and generally positive for development; various forms of rewards drive humans to get up in the morning, do a good job, and act responsibly. The discussion now turns to the opportunity to secure more benefits than are entitled to within the existing rules of the game; specifically, the opportunity to grab at the expense of society. A decision maker has the authority to influence an outcome that matters to the briber. For steering a decision in the bribers direction, the decision maker is compensated with a bribe. The steered decision and the bribe now become assets that usually exceed what at least one of the players would have obtained without the corrupt act. The opportunity to seize assets through some form of power misuse differs across sectors, organizations, and decision-making situations. This chapter describes the circumstances in which the risk of corruption is particularly highin other words, where the drivers of corruption can be found.