House prices in Europe have shown diverging trends, and this paper seeks to explain these differences by analyzing three groups of countries: the quot;fast lanequot;, the average performers, and the slow movers. Price movements in the first two groups are found to be driven mostly by income and...

The SDN will assess the youth unemployment problem in advanced European countries, with a special focus on the euro area. It will document the main trends in youth and adult unemployment in 22 European countries before and after the global financial crisis. It will identify the main drivers of...

The crisis has intensified what was previously a chronic unemployment problem in Europe; youth unemployment is now at unprecedented highs in some European countries. This paper assesses the main drivers of youth unemployment in Europe. It finds that much of the increase in youth unemployment...

In most developing countries, there is an active debate on the changing role of the government in mediating market outcomes. In grain markets in India, this debate assumes a renewed significance, given the excessive accumulation of food stocks in recent years. For example, the wisdom of...

Many small wholesale grain markets in India are characterized by large numbers of sellers, and a relatively small number of buyers, thereby lending the price formation process open to manipulation through collusion. Government intervention limits the extent of such manipulation by instituting...

In this paper we assess (a) consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for a recently developed variety of maize that is high in provitamin A in the context of a public health intervention and (b) the performance of three elicitation mechanisms in estimating WTP in a field experiment in Ghana....

This paper analyzes the institutions and markets that govern groundwater allocation in the sugarcane belt of Uttar Pradesh, India, using primary, plot-level data from a village which shares the typical features of this region. Electricity powers tube well pumps, and its erratic supply translates...

We provide a novel experimental auction design, in which (i) an exogenous decrease in the probability of winning, conditional on the bid, reduces the optimal bid of a loss averse agent whose reference point is expectations based; (ii) observed bid distributions uniquely identify the participants'...

This paper uses primary data to analyze the institutions and informal markets that govern groundwater allocation in a sugarcane-cultivating village in North India. We find that, in contrast to earlier literature, the observed water trades result in efficient water allocation across farms. We...