Assessing health system performance: a model-based approach.

It is difficult to assess countries' relative success in addressing issues of public health because countries are subject to very different background conditions. To address this problem we offer a model-based approach for assessing health system performance. Specifically, an index of public health is regressed against a vector of variables intended to capture economic, educational, cultural, geographic, and epidemiological endowments.

Field experiment estimate of electoral fraud in Russian parliamentary elections.

Electoral fraud is a widespread phenomenon, especially outside the developed world. Despite abundant qualitative and anecdotal evidence on its existence from around the world, there is very limited quantitative evidence on the extent of electoral fraud. We exploit random assignment of independent observers to 156 of 3,164 polling stations in the city of Moscow to estimate the effect of electoral fraud on the outcome of the Russian parliamentary elections held on December 4, 2011.