This paper contributes towards the growing debate concerning the world distribution of income and its evolution over that past three to four decades. Our methodological approach is twofold. First, we formally test for the number of modes in a cross-sectional analysis where each country is...

We examine the impact of inflation on financial development in Brazil and the data available permit us to cover the period between 1985 and 2002. The results?based initially on time-series and then on panel time-series data and analysis, and robust for different estimators and financial...

We conduct an empirical study on how 22 donors allocate their bilateral aid among 147 recipient countries over the 1970-2004 period to investigate whether recent changes in the international aid architecture-at the international and country level-have led to changes in donor behavior. We find...

Nonfarm activities generate on average about 60 percent of rural households? incomes in the eastern Himalayan region of India. This paper analyzes the determinants of participation in nonfarm activities and of nonfarm incomes across rural households. We present and explore an analytical...

In 2009, Germany invested 15.4 Billion Euro in infrastructure to avert the looming recession. In this study, we evaluate whether the German stimulus program was successful in limiting the impact of the crisis on the job market. We exploit exogenous cross-sectional variation to identify the...

The paper investigates the effects of temporary consumption tax cuts using firm-level data. As part of its countercyclical measures implemented during the recent global economic crisis, Tur-key temporarily lowered consumption taxes on selected durables. Our empirical strategy ex-ploits variation...

Using VAR analysis on US data, we show that unanticipated fiscal expansions boost private consumption and business formation. Models with an extensive investment margin, i.e. endogenous firm and product entry, have difficulties explaining these two phenomena simultaneously. Considering different...