This paper provides new empirical insights on the joint distribution of consumption, income, and wealth (CIW) in three of the poorest countries in the world - Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda - all located in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Our first finding is that while income inequality is similar to...

I use a regression discontinuity design to study incumbency effects in Brazilian mayoral elections. For mayors elected in 1996 I find no evidence of an incumbency effect on the probability of being elected in 2000. For the 2000-2004 electoral cycle I also find no effect except for races where...

According to our model effective 'budgetary' separation of power occurs in the states with the line-item veto when the Governor is not aligned with the Legislature. Only then is the Legislature, which approves the budget and sets the tax level, not the full residual claimant of a tax release....

We study the effects of front-loading the payment of unemployment benefits in general equilibrium economies with imperfect labor and insurance markets, focusing on the trade-off between improved re-employment rates and the potential welfare losses accruing from consumption-smoothing problems....

We consider auctions where bidders care about the reputational effects of their bidding and argue that the amount of information that is disclosed at the end of the auction will influence bidding. Our analysis focuses on several bid disclosure rules that capture all of the realistic cases. We...

We estimate a non-linear and discontinuous relationship between the tax level and the degree of alignment between the legislature and the governor, measured as the number of seats in the legislature that belong to the governor’s party. In the states with the line-item veto, there is a jump in...

We study the effects of job-security provisions through the lens of a search-matching model with risk-neutral employers, risk-averse workers and incomplete asset markets. This setting limits the ability of agents to reallocate payments over time, and thereby to undo any mandatory transfer...

We examine whether structural transformation leads to a Kuznets curve. We present a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous workers, occupational self-selection and selective migration, and calibrate the model to survey data for Malawi. We show that structural transformation raises...

For many developing countries, international transfers are now a significant source of income. These transfers include official development aid, private charitable donations, and personal remittances. This paper uses dynamic one-sector and multi-sector models to isolate conditions under which...

This study examines the long-run relationship between the real world price of maize, soybeans and sugar with the real world price of crude oil and a series of macroeconomic variables using a cointegration analysis from January 1982 until December 2012. The main empirical results support a strong...