This paper describes a duopoly market for healthcare where one of the two providers is publicly owned and charges a price of zero, while the other sets a price so as to maximize its profit. Both providers are subject to congestion in the form of an M/M/1 queue, and they serve patient-consumers...

Drawing on an in-depth governance micro-survey of public officials in Bolivia, we address empirically the question of the relative importance of the various determinants of governance. We find that commonly made inferences about policy based on simple correlation can be highly misleading due to...

This paper examines the policy challenges that a country faces when it wants to both reduce inflation and maintain a sustainable external position. Robert Mundell's policy assignment framework suggests that these two goals may be mutually incompatible unless monetary and fiscal policies are...

Past research on the allocation of federal resources to localities has failed to account for the interaction between federal and state governments. Here a sequential-move game of such interaction is developed, where state governments behave like political surrogates for the federal government...

Agriculture important in Africa, employing a large share of the labor force and earning foreign exchange. Transport connectivity has long been a crucial constraint in the region. In theory, railways have the advantage of shipping bulky freight, such as fertilizer, at low costs. However, in many...

Do firms bribe government officials to reduce their costs or do bribe payments arise because of extortion from government officials? Using three of the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance surveys of firms across several countries and employing various estimation methodologies, this...

This study is an empirical analysis of the factors associated with the use of the US dollar for the invoicing of domestic transactions, which is a common practice of Uruguayan firms. Using a novel dataset we find that both the input and debt structure of firms are relevant for determining their...

Using panel data from Chilean manufacturing plants, we estimate the impact of a stamp tax, levied on loans by financial institutions, on capital stock. Our results show that the tax has a statistically significant negative effect on the stock of capital. Specifically, we find that a rise of one...

We build a semi-endogenous growth model for developing countries with non-rivalrous public factors, imported capital goods, and an export demand function. The model exhibits the three-way interaction between public and private investment and trade shown recently in the empirical literature. A...