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作者：Luoto, Jani
作者单位：University of Helsinki
摘要：In this paper, Bayesian methods and the Finnish aggregate infrastructure capital series from 1860 to 2003 are used to explore how government infrastructure policy affects long-run output growth. We use Finnish data, since to the best of our knowledge the Finnish land and water construction investments series is the best available sufficiently long time series on aggregate infrastructure investments. The Finnish data provide strong and robust evidence indicating that permanent changes in govern...
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作者：Barham, Tania
作者单位：University of Colorado System; University of Colorado Boulder; University of Colorado System; University of Colorado Boulder
摘要：Conditional cash transfer programs seek to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty by building the human capital of poor children. Despite their popularity throughout the developing world, relatively little is known about their effect on children's health outcomes. This paper evaluates the impact of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program, Progresa, on two important health outcomes: infant and neonatal mortality. It exploits the phasing-in of Progresa over time throughout rur...
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作者：Wilson, John Douglas
作者单位：Michigan State University
摘要：This paper investigates the welfare effects of brain-drain taxes levied by non-benevolent governments, whereby a country collects a tax from skilled emigrants but potentially wastes a sizable portion of the revenue. Using a model in which taxes are chosen to maximize expected political rents. I show that the availability of a brain-drain tax increases a weighted sum of citizen utilities. However, the government's optimal brain-drain tax is found to be higher than the level that maximizes this ...
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作者：Sharif, Iffath A.
作者单位：The World Bank
摘要：The impact of political competition on ethnic discrimination remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, this paper explores the relationship between the level of political competition and the probability of receiving government transfers among ethnic minorities in Sri Lanka in the run up to the national elections of 2000. The paper shows that making politicians dependent on the votes of members of ethnic groups other their own can encourage moderation in discriminatory practices towards ...
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作者：Jaimovich, Esteban
作者单位：Collegio Carlo Alberto
摘要：I present a theory of development in which heterogeneously talented entrepreneurs require credit to start new projects and open new sectors. During development the variety of sectors expands, which allows better sorting of entrepreneurial talent. The paper shows that, in addition to increasing the average productivity of matches between agents and sectors, this process also mitigates informational frictions in the financial markets. Furthermore, the impact of sectoral variety on the operation ...
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作者：Baez, Javier E.
作者单位：The World Bank
摘要：In early 1994, Kagera - a region in northwestern Tanzania - was flooded by more than 500,000 refugees fleeing from the genocides of Burundi and Rwanda. I use this population shock and a series of topographic barriers that resulted in variation in refugee intensity to investigate the short- and long-run causal effects of hosting refugees on outcomes of local children. This strategy provides evidence of adverse impacts over one year after the shock: a worsening of children's anthropometrics (0.3...
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作者：Christiaensen, Luc; Demery, Lionel; Kuhl, Jesper
摘要：The role of agriculture in development remains much debated. This paper takes an empirical perspective and focuses on poverty, as opposed to growth alone. The contribution of a sector to poverty reduction is shown to depend on its own growth performance, its indirect impact on growth in other sectors, the extent to which poor people participate in the sector, and the size of the sector in the overall economy. Bringing together these different effects using cross-country econometric evidence in...
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作者：Helmers, Christian; Patnam, Manasa
作者单位：University of Cambridge; University of Oxford
摘要：Building on recent advances in the literature and using a rich data set for two cohorts of children aged between one and twelve for Andhra Pradesh, India, we investigate the determinants of children's cognitive as well as non-cognitive skills. We find evidence of self-productivity for cognitive skills and cross-productivity effects from cognitive on non-cognitive skills. Moreover, we demonstrate that parental investment has contemporaneously positive effects on skill levels for all age groups....
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作者：McAusland, Carol; Kuhn, Peter
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Santa Barbara; University of British Columbia; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We introduce international mobility of knowledge workers into a model of Nash equilibrium IPR policy choice among countries. We show that governments have incentives to use IPRs in a bidding war for global talent, resulting in Nash equilibrium IPRs that can be too high, rather than too low, from a global welfare perspective. These incentives become stronger as developing countries grow in size and wealth, thus allowing them to prevent the 'poaching' of their 'brains' by larger, wealthier marke...
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作者：Bown, Chad P.; Tovar, Patricia
作者单位：The World Bank; Brandeis University; Brandeis University
摘要：This paper is the first to use product-level data to examine empirically whether countries use antidumping and safeguard exceptions to unwind commitments to lower tariffs in the face of domestic political-economic pressure. We focus on the case of India, a country that underwent a major exogenous tariff reform program in the early 1990s and subsequently initiated substantial use of safeguard and antidumping import restrictions. We first estimate structural determinants of India's import protec...
