This paper studies empirically the effects of and the interactions amongst economic and political liberalizations. Economic liberalizations are measured by a widely used indicator that captures the scope of the market in the economy, and in particular of policies towards freer international...

This paper empirically studies the impact of decentralization and inter-jurisdictional competition on foreign aid effectiveness. For this purpose we examine a commonly used empirical growth model, considering different measures of fiscal decentralization. Our panel estimations reveal that...

Food for education (FFE) programs, including meals served in school and take-home rations conditional on school attendance, have received renewed attention recently as a policy instrument for achieving the Millennium Development Goals of universal primary education and the reduction of hunger in...

This paper examines the effect of global transition to simpler, flatter income tax systems on the size of the shadow economy. By offering a new estimation framework, the paper revives the traditional electricity consumption approach to measuring the shadow economy. It overcomes the limitations...

This paper evaluates the impact of Round I of the federal urban Empowerment Zone (EZ) program on neighborhood level labor and housing market outcomes over the period 1994-2000. Using four decades of Census data in conjunction with information on the proposed boundaries of rejected EZs, we find...

This paper assesses the impact of school feeding programs on internal effectiveness (dropout and grade repetition) of public primary schools in Senegalese rural area using a “randomized trial”. Our study sample consists of 120 schools, which did not have school canteens before the...

This paper describes the changes in economic policies and in macroeconomic conditions in the 1990s and analyses their impact on the agricultural sector in Brazil. We emphasize four aspects of the reform period that were either unexpected or not given sufficient attention by authors writing in...

In the 1992 United States presidential campaign, Bill Clinton and his staff regularly invoked the forceful reminder "It's the economy, stupid!" in order to maintain a tight focus on the core issue that would ultimately decide their electoral success or failure. This initially seemed reductionist...

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance has provided over US$16 billion in funding for vaccination expansion in low-income countries since its founding in 1999. We exploit differential timing in Gavi support across countries and vaccines to estimate the effects of this large-scale public health initiative....

This paper studies how wealth and health inequalities have interacted with the Covid-19 epidemic in a way that has reinforced inequalities in income, savings, epidemic risk and even individual preventive behaviors. We present in more detail two papers and their theoretical and empirical results....