The results of a cross-country empirical analysis suggest that political institutions are extremely important in determining the prevalence of corruption: democracy, parliamentary systems, political stability, and freedom of the press are all associated with lower corruption.Using a...

This paper aims to present causality tests between financial system and economic growth in the frequency domain for Brazil, India, France, Japan, United States and Korea. This approach allows to capture nonlinearities in the direction of the causality from short to longer terms. Indeed the...

Using a cross-country panel, Lederman, Loayza, and Soares examine the determinants of corruption, paying particular attention to political institutions that increase political accountability. Previous empirical studies have not analyzed the role of political institutions, even though both the...

O objetivo deste artigo é testar empiricamente a existência de dualidade no mercado de trabalho brasileiro. O método de análise consiste em avaliar em que medida são observadas diferenças salariais entre trabalhadores que não são explicadas apenas por diferenças nos seus atributos...

This paper analyses the recent evolution of life expectancy in Latin American and Caribbean countries, and evaluates how much it has contributed to the overall improvements in welfare. We argue that increases in life expectancy between 1960 and 2000, which were largely independent of income,...

This paper analyzes the impact of rainfall fluctuations during the gestational period on health at birth. We concentrate on the semiarid region of Northeastern Brazil to highlight the role of water scarcity as a determinant of early life health. We find that negative rainfall shocks are robustly...

Roughly one-third of the rural population in developing countries lives in arid and semiarid regions, facing recurrent water scarcity. This is likely to become an even more common situation with climate change. This paper analyzes the impact of rainfall fluctuations during the gestational period...