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作者：Poelhekke, Steven
作者单位：European Central Bank; De Nederlandsche Bank NV
摘要：Rapid urbanization also happens when economic growth and urban job creation are absent, such as in Africa and Latin America during the eighties. Why do some countries urbanize faster while having worse economic growth? This paper finds that higher aggregate agricultural risk induces rural-urban migration, providing an additional channel to explain the urbanization trend. Uninsurable expected risk will lead to rural-urban migration as a form of ex-ante insurance if households are liquidity cons...
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作者：Javorcik, Beata S.; Oezden, Caglar; Spatareanu, Mariana; Neagu, Cristina
作者单位：University of Oxford; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; The World Bank; Rutgers University System; Rutgers University New Brunswick; Rutgers University Newark
摘要：Although there exists a sizeable literature documenting the importance of ethnic networks for international trade, little attention has been devoted to studying the effects of migrants on foreign direct investment (FDI). The presence of migrants can stimulate FDI by promoting information flows across international borders and by serving as a contract enforcement mechanism. This paper investigates the link between the presence of migrants in the US and US FDI in the migrants' countries of origi...
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作者：Gine, Xavier
作者单位：The World Bank
摘要：This paper analyzes the mechanism underlying access to credit, focusing on two important aspects of rural credit markets. First, moneylenders and other informal lenders coexist with formal lending institutions such as government or commercial banks, and, more recently, micro-lending institutions. Second, potential borrowers presumably face sizable transaction costs in obtaining external credit. We develop and estimate a model based on limited enforcement and transaction costs that provides a u...
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作者：Henderson, J. Vernon; Kuncoro, Ari
作者单位：Brown University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Indonesia
摘要：Indonesia has a tradition of corruption among local officials who harass and collect bribes from firms. This paper examines whether corruption is affected by local democratization and by the party composition of local assemblies. Democratization occurred in 1999 and decentralization in 2001. We have firm-level data for 2001 and 2004. The 2001 data benchmark corruption at the time of decentralization. We find that corruption declines between 2001 and 2004 overall, but much less so in districts ...
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作者：Ponczek, Vladimir
作者单位：Getulio Vargas Foundation
摘要：This study examines the impacts of the 1991 reform of Brazil's rural pension system on schooling and health indicators. We conclude that the reform had significant positive effects on schooling, especially on literacy for girls co-residing with a male pensioner. We were unable to find similar results for children living with a female pensioner. We further investigated whether these results were driven by bargaining power differences within households; our findings suggest that this explanation...
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作者：Qiu, Larry D.; Wang, Susheng
作者单位：Hong Kong University of Science & Technology; University of Hong Kong
摘要：In recent years, governments have been increasingly adopting Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) contracts for large infrastructure projects. However, BOT contracts have received little attention from economists. The apparent agency problem in BOT projects has never been analyzed. In this paper, we develop a model to examine the incentives, efficiency and regulation in ROT contracts. We show that a BOT contract with a price regulation during the concession period and a license extension after the con...
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作者：Francois, Joseph; Rojas-Romagosa, Hugo
作者单位：Johannes Kepler University Linz; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy
摘要：Working with Sen social welfare functions (meaning explicit separability between mean income and income dispersion), we develop a generalized dual approach to tracking household inequality aspects of social welfare in general equilibrium. We highlight how household equity can be examined analytically alongside production efficiency in duality-based models, using our dual framework to explore potential trade-offs between efficiency and equity effects of trade policy. Our results complement the ...
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作者：Holz, Carsten A.
作者单位：University of Southern California; Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
摘要：Albert Hirschman's unbalanced growth hypothesis suggests that a developing economy can promote economic growth by initially investing in industries with high backward and forward linkages. In the case of Chinese economic policy today, one application would be the continued presence of the state in high-linkage sectors and the strategic withdrawal of the state from low-linkage sectors. The evidence shows that while the degree of linkage plays an important role in generating economic growth in C...
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作者：Lamarche, Carlos
作者单位：University of Oklahoma System; University of Oklahoma - Norman
摘要：This paper employs newly developed quantile regression techniques to investigate a policy that could differentially affect students' performance. The Colombian vouchers were assigned using lotteries, and were renewable as long as the students maintained satisfactory academic progress. This second aspect of the program may provide incentives for low attainment students to work harder. The evidence supports the hypothesis that incentives could account for the impact of the vouchers, including lo...
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作者：Kandilov, Ivan T.; Leblebicioglu, Asli
作者单位：North Carolina State University
摘要：We estimate the impact of exchange rate volatility on firms' investment decisions in a developing country setting. Employing plant-level panel data from the Colombian Manufacturing Census, we estimate a dynamic investment equation using the system-GMM estimator developed by Arellano and Bover (1995) and Blundell and Bond (1998). We find a robust negative impact of exchange rate volatility, constructed either using a GARCH model or a simple standard deviation measure, on plant investment. Consi...
