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作者：Khemani, Stuti
摘要：This paper provides evidence that vote buying in poor democracies is associated with lower investments in broadly delivered public services that have been shown to disproportionately benefit the poor. Using detailed data around the local institutional context in the Philippines, the paper shows how the correlation can be interpreted as arising in equilibrium under conditions of clientelism, when political strategies emphasize the provision of targeted benefits in exchange for political support...
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作者：Garganta, Santiago; Gasparini, Leonardo
作者单位：National University of La Plata; Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas (CONICET)
摘要：The recent Universal Child Allowance program in Argentina provides monthly cash transfers to unregistered workers with children. As the program is accessible only to those who are not in formal employment, it may discourage workers' transitions to the formal sector. In this paper we estimate this effect by comparing the transitions to registered jobs of eligible workers (with children) with a similar but not eligible group (without children) over time. The results suggest a statistically signi...
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作者：Dower, Paul Castaneda; Pfutze, Tobias
作者单位：New Economic School; University System of Ohio; Oberlin College
摘要：While it is commonly understood that land is a political tool, there is surprisingly little empirical research on how insecure property rights affect political outcomes. In this paper, we show how a dominant political party can use insecure property rights to ensure politically compliant voter behavior and how this power is frustrated after the introduction of a land certification program. We test this hypothesis on data covering 10,000 Mexican municipal elections during the country's democrat...
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作者：James, Alexander
作者单位：University of Alaska System; University of Alaska Anchorage
摘要：A surprising feature of resource-rich economies is slow growth. It is often argued that natural-resource production impedes development by creating market or institutional failures. This paper establishes an alternative explanation-a slow-growing resource sector. A declining resource sector is disproportionately reflected in resource-dependent countries. Additionally, there is little evidence that resource dependence impedes growth in non-resource sectors. More generally, this paper illustrate...
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作者：Rocha, Rudi; Soares, Rodrigo R.
作者单位：Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; Getulio Vargas Foundation
摘要：Roughly one-third of the rural population in developing countries lives in arid and semiarid regions, facing recurrent water scarcity. This is likely to become an even more common situation with climate change. This paper analyzes the impact of rainfall fluctuations during the gestational period on health at birth in the Brazilian semiarid, highlighting the role of water scarcity as a determinant of early life health. We find that negative rainfall shocks are robustly correlated with higher in...
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作者：Wagner, Rodrigo; Zahler, Andres
作者单位：Tufts University; Universidad de Chile; University Diego Portales
摘要：We study the micro dynamics of new exports from a country. The modern international trade workhorse models (e.g. Melitz, 2003) assume heterogeneous productivity and, implicitly, predict that the ex-post largest exporters in a new product would be the pioneers, since they can pay back exploration costs. However, using detailed data on the early dynamics of new exports in Chile (1990-2007) we show that, on average, pioneers export less than comparable followers in the same new product. Moreover,...
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作者：Janus, Thorsten; Riera-Crichton, Daniel
摘要：Using a novel cross-country panel dataset, we show that commodity terms of trade declines cause civil war in countries with intermediate ethnic diversity. The civil war effects for highly diverse or homogenous societies are negative and insignificant. Since the size of the largest ethnic group explains 96% of the variation in the ethnic diversity measure, we conjecture that a key problem may be ethnic dominance: countries where the ethnic plurality is large, but not so large it cannot be chall...
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作者：Chuang, Yating; Schechter, Laura
作者单位：University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison
摘要：Underlying preferences are often considered to be persistent, and are important inputs into economic models. We first conduct an extensive review of the disparate literature studying the stability of preferences measured in experiments. Then, we test the stability of individuals' choices in panel data from rural Paraguay over almost a decade. Answers to social preference survey questions are quite stable. Experimental measures of risk, time, and social preferences do not exhibit much stability...
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作者：Chan, Jackie M. L.; Manova, Kalina
作者单位：Stanford University
摘要：What determines the choice of countries' trade partners? We show theoretically and empirically that financial market imperfections affect the number and identity of exporters' destinations. Bigger economies with lower trade costs are more attractive markets because they offer higher export profits. This generates a pecking order of destinations such that firms serve all countries above a cut-off level of market potential. Credit constraints, however, raise this cut-off above the first best. Fi...
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作者：Han, Li; Kung, James Kai-Sing
作者单位：Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
摘要：This paper examines how fiscal incentives affect the policy choices of local governments in the context of China. Based on exogenous changes in the intergovernmental revenue-sharing scheme, we construct a simulated instrumental variable to resolve the endogeneity problem. We find evidence that local governments shifted their efforts from fostering industrial growth to urbanizing China, i.e., to developing the real estate and construction sectors, when their retention rate of enterprise tax rev...
