This study investigates the impact of World Bank development policy loans on the ease of doing business. It finds that the cumulative number of development policy loans enhances business climate, especially for less developed countries and when combined with an International Monetary Fund...

This paper studies the effect of public sector efficiency on firm productivity using data from more than 400,000 firms across Italy's provinces. Exploiting the large heterogeneity in the efficiency of the public sector across Italian provinces and the intrinsic variation in the dependence of...

This paper surveys fiscal policy in developing countries from the point of view of long-run growth. The first section reviews existing methodologies to estimate the effects of fiscal policy shocks and of systematic fiscal policy, with time series or with cross-sectional methods, and their...