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作者:Reynaud, Julien; Vauday, Julien
作者单位:European Central Bank; heSam Universite; Universite Pantheon-Sorbonne; Paris School of Economics; Institut Polytechnique de Paris; Ecole Polytechnique
摘要:There is growing awareness that the distribution of IMF facilities may not be influenced only by the economic needs of borrowers. This paper focuses on the fact that the IMF may favour geopolitically important countries in the distribution of IMF loans, differentiating between concessional and non-concessional facilities. To carry out the empirical analysis, we construct a new database that compiles a wide array of proxies for geopolitical importance for 107 IMF countries over 1990-2003, focus...
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作者:Oster, Emily
作者单位:University of Chicago; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:Increases in access to social services are often thought to decrease inequality in the level of these services between advantaged and disadvantaged groups. This is an issue in the developing world, where policymakers often argue that increasing the level of health care, for example, will decrease gender inequality. However, increases in access to services often haven empirically ambigous effects in inequality, increasing it in some cases and decreasing it in others. This paper argues that this...
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作者:Qin, Duo; Song, Haiyan
作者单位:University of London; Hong Kong Polytechnic University
摘要:This study attempts to measure the inefficiency associated with aggregate investment in a transitional economy. The inefficiency is decomposed into allocative and technical inefficiency based on standard production theory. Allocative inefficiency is measured by the deviation of actual investment from the theoretically desired investment demand. Institutional factors are then identified as part of the driving force of the deviation. The resulting model is applied to Chinese provincial panel dat...
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作者:Lin, Shu; Ye, Haichun
作者单位:University of Colorado System; University of Colorado Denver; University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus; Children's Hospital Colorado
摘要:We evaluate the treatment effect of inflation targeting in thirteen developing countries that have adopted this policy by the end of 2004. Using a variety of propensity score matching methods, we show that, on average inflation targeting has large and significant effects on lowering both inflation and inflation variability in these thirteen countries. However, the effectiveness of inflation targeting on lowering inflation is found to be quite heterogeneous. The performance of a given inflation...
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作者:Dreher, Axel; Sturm, Jan-Egbert; Vreeland, James Raymond
作者单位:Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain; ETH Zurich; Yale University
摘要:We investigate whether elected members of the UN Security Council receive favorable treatment from the World Bank, using panel data for 157 countries over the period 1970-2004. Our results indicate a robust positive relationship between temporary UN Security Council membership and the number of World Bank projects a country receives, even after accounting for economic and political factors, as well as regional, country and year effects. The size of World Bank loans, however, is not affected by...
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作者:Chang, Roberto; Kaltani, Linda; Loayza, Norman V.
作者单位:The World Bank; International Monetary Fund; National Bureau of Economic Research; Rutgers University System; Rutgers University New Brunswick
摘要:This paper Studies how the effect of trade openness on economic growth may depend on complementary reforms that help a country take advantage of international competition. This issue is illustrated with a simple Harris-Todaro model where welfare gains after trade openness depend on the degree of labor market flexibility. The paper then presents cross-country, panel-data evidence on how the growth effect of openness may depend on a variety of structural characteristics. For this purpose, the em...
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作者:Kumar, Krishna B.; Matsusaka, John G.
作者单位:RAND Corporation; Rand Health
摘要:This paper develops a theory in which individuals can use one of two types of human/social capital to enforce contracts: Local capital relies on families and other personal networks; market capital relies on impersonal market institutions such as auditors and courts. Local capital is efficient when most trading is local, but only market capital can support trading between strangers that allows extensive division of labor and industrialization. We show that economies with a low cost of accumula...
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作者:Larson, Donald F.; Plessmann, Frank
作者单位:The World Bank
摘要:Farming households that differ in their ability or willingness to take on risks are likely to allocate resources and effort among income producing activities differently with consequences for productivity. In this paper we measure voluntary and involuntary departures from efficiency for rice producing households in the Bicol region of the Philippines. We take advantage of a panel of observations on households from 1978, 1983 and 1994. Available monthly weather data and survey information on pl...
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作者:Martimort, David; Straub, Stephane
作者单位:Universite de Toulouse; Universite Toulouse 1 Capitole; Toulouse School of Economics; University of Edinburgh
摘要:This paper offers a theory of how the degree of corruption that prevails in a society responds to changes in the ownership structure of major public service providers. We show that there are cases in which privatization, even though it fosters investments in infrastructure, also opens the door to more corruption. The public dissatisfaction towards privatization is then crucially affected by the changes in the degree and pattern of corruption. Our model thus helps understand the seemingly parad...
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作者:Dong, Xiao-yuan; Zhang, Liqin
作者单位:University of Winnipeg; China Agricultural University
摘要:We use firm-level data to analyze male-female wage differences in Chinese industry in the late 1990s. Our estimates indicate that employers' discrimination against women was not a significant source of the gender wage gap in Chinese state-owned enterprises. Instead, we find that the relative wage of unskilled female to male workers was higher than their relative productivity. This result indicates that unskilled female workers in the state sector had historically received wage premiums and con...