A functional weakness of the training market is the extreme difficulty with which potential purchasers of "training" can gauge the quality of training programs in advance of payment. However, no training provider would allow a customer to delay payment of course fees until the course has been...

The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of current practices in the provision of business development services (BDS) to small and microentrepreneurs in developing countries. The document is meant to serve as a resource for Bank staff and other development practitioners who play a...

El propósito de este estudio es el de proporcionar una visión general de las prácticas actuales en el suministro de Servicios de Desarrollo Empresarial (SDE) a pequeños y micro empresarios en los países en vías de desarrollo. Por servicios de desarrollo empresarial nos referimos a...

A functional weakness of the training market is the extreme difficulty with which potential purchasers of "training" can gauge the quality of training programs in advance of payment. However, no training provider would allow a customer to delay payment of course fees until the course has been...

The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of current practices in the provision of business development services (BDS) to small and microentrepreneurs in developing countries. The document is meant to serve as a resource for Bank staff and other development practitioners who play a...

This paper investigates the effects of political (mis)alignment on public service delivery when mandates are shared between state and local governments. We analyze sewage treatment policies in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Relying on difference-in-differences estimations, we establish a...

This paper provides the first experimental evaluation of the participatory budgeting model showing that it increased public participation in the process of public decision making, increased local tax revenues collection, channeled larger fractions of public budgets to services stated as top...

This working paper advances research on inequality with unique, new data on income distribution in 61 countries, including 20 Latin American countries, to explore the effects of political parties on redistribution. First, consistent with a central, but still contested, assumption of the...

In the last decades, countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have experienced a dramatic increase in the levels of higher education enrollment. Using administrative data from Chile and Colombia, we find that this phenomenon is not always associated with higher private individual returns. In...

This paper develops a semiotic-inferential model of verbal communication for incomplete information games: a language is seen as a set of conventional signs that point to types, and the credibility of a message depends on the strategic context. Formally, there is an encoding-decoding step where...