Much of what may be coined the creeping degradation of the environment is due to economic projects which are subject to public approval. The erection of buildings, the siting of factories, all require permission from bureaucracies. To answer the question whether there is too much or not enough...

We show that the impact of foreign aid on bureaucratic quality in recipient countries varies with the mode of delivery. Specifically, grants are found to impair the functioning of the bureaucracy, whereas loans are not. The negative impact of grants is larger when they are given as budget...

Administrative burdens may deepen inequality by creating costly experiences for vulnerable groups. Research to date typically focuses on how burdens affect decisions in specific policy contexts, thus little is known about everyday experiences of burdens and their distribution in society. This is...

Recent experimental evidence suggests that donors are averse to giving to charities with high overhead ratios. This paper asks whether donors are also averse to giving to charities spending a high share of the donations on unavoidable administrative expenses. The results of an experiment with a...

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing controversy on the distributional effects of structural reforms in developing countries. To this end, we set up a small-scale macroeconomic model of a dual economy to capture the transmission mechanisms through which the deregulation of product and...

A review of the measures of the stock of human capital used in empirical growth research reveals that human capital is mostly poorly proxied. The simple use of the most common proxy, average years of schooling of the working-age population, misspecifies the relationship between education and the...

Die vorliegende Untersuchung stellt die technischen Grundlagen und die Marktordnung für den internationalen Handel mit Dienstleistungen der Informationstechnologie dar; sie analysiert und bewertet die resultierenden Handelsbarrieren. Die Funktionsweise des Internets (Netzaufbau, Adress- und...

Die vorliegende Untersuchung stellt die technischen Grundlagen und die Marktordnung für den internationalen Handel mit Telekommunikationsdienstleistungen dar; sie analysiert und bewertet die resultierenden Handelsbarrieren. Die Grundstruktur internationaler Telekommunikation wird in...

This paper discusses environmental policies in response to foreign direct investment (FDI) in a symmetrie two-country setting, where firms' behavior affects government policy decisions. We show that two alternative equilibria with FDI are possible: (i) one with unilateral FDI, where one firm is...

This study seeks to explain why crude oil prices fluctuate, the main cause being the quota regime, which characterises the OPEC agreements. Given that the Saudi oil supply is inelastic in the short term, a shock in the oil market is accommodated by an immediate price change. In contrast, a...