TY  - JOUR
AU  - Banerjee,Abhijit
AU  - Iyer,Lakshmi
AU  - Somanathan,Rohini
TI  - Public Action for Public Goods
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12911
PY  - 2007
Y2  - February 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12911
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12911.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Abhijit Banerjee
MIT
Department of Economics
E52-252d
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02142-1347
Tel: 617/253-8855
Fax: 617/253-1330
E-Mail: banerjee@mit.edu

Lakshmi Iyer
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
Tel: 617-495-6250
Fax: 617-496-5994
E-Mail: liyer@hbs.edu

Rohini Somanathan
Delhi School of Economics
University of Delhi
Delhi 110007 INDIA
E-Mail: rohini@econdse.org
AB  - 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.
ER  -