The authors analyze general equilibrium relationships between trade policy and the household distribution of income, decomposing social welfare into real income level and variance components and emphasizing Gini and Atkinson indexes. They embed these inequality-adjusted social welfare functions...

The authors use Morocco's national survey of living standards to measure the short-term welfare impacts of prior estimates of the price changes attributed to various trade policy reforms for cereals-the country's main food staple. They find small impacts on mean consumption and inequality in the...

The authors use a computable general equilibrium model to estimate the marginal cost of public funds (MCF) for taxes on domestic goods, exports, imports, capital, and labor in 38 African countries. The resulting MCF estimates provide directions for tax reform in Africa. The authors investigate...

This paper documents new facts on corporate taxation and the revenue potential of corporate minimum taxes, leveraging firm-level tax returns from 16 countries. First, effective tax rates follow a humped-shaped pattern with firm size: small firms benefit from reduced rates, while large firms take...

This paper examines the potential distributional effects of a tax increase on processed and ultra-processed foods. Using data from the most recent Brazilian consumption survey (POF 2017/2018), it analyzes the welfare changes that households would experience when facing increased costs for these...

This paper studies channels through which well-known benchmark indexes impact asset allocations and capital flows across countries. The study uses unique monthly micro-level data of benchmark compositions and mutual fund investments during 1996-2012. Benchmarks have important effects on equity...

A decade long experience shows that monitoring the performance of public and private monopolies in South America is proving to be the hard part of the reform process. The operators who control most of the information needed for regulatory purposes have little interest in volunteering their...

This paper examines the economic and social implications of the current system of residential electricity subsidies in Pakistan, and assesses the potential to improve the system's outcomes through alternative targeting and program design. The analysis is multi-disciplinary in nature, drawing on...

This paper investigates China's influence on local economic development in 37 African countries between 1997 and 2007. The analysis compares the average changes in economic growth, migration, spatial inequality, and welfare for mineral-rich districts, pre- and post-accession, to the...