-
作者：Ilzetzki, Ethan
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：Recent research has demonstrated that while government expenditures are countercyclical in most industrialized countries, they tend to be procyclical in developing countries. We develop a dynamic political-economy model to explain this phenomenon. In the model, public expenditures provide insurance to uninsured households, and optimal fiscal policy is countercyclical. The introduction of a political friction, in which successive governments disagree on the desired distribution of public spendi...
-
作者：Lam, David; Ardington, Cally; Leibbrandt, Murray
作者单位：University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; University of Cape Town
摘要：This paper analyzes the large racial differences in progress through secondary school in South Africa. Using recently collected longitudinal data we find that grade advancement is strongly associated with scores on a baseline literacy and numeracy test. In grades 8-11 the effect of these scores on grade progression is much stronger for white and coloured students than for African students, while there is no racial difference in the impact of the scores on passing the nationally standardized gr...
-
作者：Akee, Randall
作者单位：Tufts University
摘要：I report the measurement error in self-reported earnings for a developing country using a novel data set. The data set consists of two cross-sections of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) wage and salary sectors: additionally, a subset of the two cross-sections may be linked to create a panel. Administrative data from FSM Social Security office are matched to the FSM Census data for the wage and salary sectors. I find that the error in annual self-reported earnings is centered on zero. A...
-
作者：Banful, Afua Branoah
作者单位：Harvard University
摘要：Various countries have adopted formulas for determining intergovernmental transfers as a strategy to limit the role of political considerations in resource allocation. In this paper, we investigate a formula-based system of allocating resources from a central government to local governments to determine whether the political characteristics of recipient areas have any bearing on their allocation. Specifically, we study the sharing of resources of the District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF) in G...
-
作者：Chamarbagwala, Rubiana; Sharma, Gunjan
作者单位：Indiana University System; Indiana University Bloomington; University of Missouri System; University of Missouri Columbia
摘要：We investigate the relationship between industrial de-licensing, trade liberalization, and skill upgrading during the 1980s and 1990s among manufacturing plants in India. We use a unique dataset on India's industrial licensing regime to test whether industrial de-licensing during the 1980s and 1990s played a role in skill upgrading, as measured by the employment and wagebill shares of white-collar workers. In addition, we assess the relative contribution of industrial de-licensing and trade li...
-
作者：Santos, Paulo; Barrett, Christopher B.
作者单位：University of Sydney; Cornell University
摘要：This paper explores the consequences of nonlinear wealth dynamics for the formation of bilateral credit arrangements to help manage idiosyncratic risk. Using original data on expected wealth dynamics, social networks and informal loans among southern Ethiopian pastoralist households, we find that the threshold at which expected wealth dynamics bifurcate serves as a focal point at which lending is concentrated. Informal lending responds to recipients' losses but only so long as the recipients a...
-
作者：Aiolfi, Marco; Catao, Luis A. V.; Timmermann, Allan
作者单位：Inter-American Development Bank; International Monetary Fund; University of California System; University of California San Diego
摘要：We develop a common factor approach to reconstruct new business cycle indices for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico (LAC-4) from a new dataset spanning 135 years. We establish the robustness of our indices through extensive testing and use them to explore business cycle properties in LAC-4 across outward- and inward-looking policy regimes. We find that output persistence in LAC-4 has been consistently high across regimes, whereas volatility has been markedly time-varying but without display...
-
作者：Gibson, John; McKenzie, David
作者单位：The World Bank; University of Waikato
摘要：A unique survey which tracks worldwide the best and brightest academic performers from three Pacific countries is used to assess the extent of emigration and return migration among the very highly skilled, and to analyze, at the microeconomic level, the determinants of these migration choices. Although we estimate that the income gains from migration are very large, not everyone migrates and many return. Within this group of highly skilled individuals the emigration decision is found to be mos...
-
作者：Javorcik, Beata S.; Spatareanu, Mariana
作者单位：University of Oxford; University of Oxford; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Rutgers University System; Rutgers University New Brunswick; Rutgers University Newark
摘要：This study uses firm-level panel data from Romania to examine whether the origin of foreign investors affects the degree of vertical spillovers from FDI. Investors' origin may matter for spillovers to domestic producers supplying intermediate inputs in two ways. First, the share of intermediates sourced locally by multinationals is likely to increase with the distance between the host and the source economy. Second, the sourcing pattern is likely to be affected by preferential trade agreements...
-
作者：Ghoshray, Atanu
作者单位：University of Bath
摘要：This paper conducts a reexamination of the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis by employing the unit root test proposed by Lee and Strazicich (2003) and Lee and Strazicich (2004) that allow for up to two structural breaks. Given the higher power of these tests compared to the Zivot and Andrews (1992) and Lumsdaine and Papell (1997) tests, rejection of the null can be considered as genuine evidence of stationarity. The main findings of this paper are that eleven out of twenty-four commodity prices are f...
