This paper addresses two basic issues related to technological innovation and climate stabilisation objectives: i) Can innovation policies be effective in stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations? ii) To what extent can innovation policies complement carbon pricing (taxes or permit trading) and...

This paper addresses two basic issues related to technological innovation and climate stabilisation objectives: i) Can innovation policies be effective in stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations? ii) To what extent can innovation policies complement carbon pricing (taxes or permit trading) and...

Advanced economies made available more than 5 trillion USD through government-supported credit guarantee and direct loan programs to provide lifelines to firms in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Notwithstanding the unprecedented scale of credit made available, an in-depth analysis of the...

Governments throughout the world are requiring greater use of economic analysis as a way of informing key policy decisions. The European Union now requires that an impact assessment be done for all major policy initiatives. An evaluation of the EU system could provide lessons for the U.S. and...

Whether the U.S. government should be allowed to claim credit for the private philanthropy of its citizens is a hot topic in today's foreign aid debate. Overlooked in this debate, however, is a form of aid that straddles the traditional public/private divide: charitable tax expenditures. Through...

The large economic costs of full-blown lockdowns in response to COVID-19 outbreaks, coupled with heterogeneous mortality rates across age groups, led to question non-discriminatory containment measures. In this paper we provide an assessment of the targeted approach to containment. We propose a...

We introduce the German Business Panel (GBP), a novel large-scale survey of German firms. The GBP periodically surveys executives and key decision-makers in a representative sample of German firms, taking stock of their perceptions, views, and expectations. A particular focus of the survey is on...

Regulatory impact assessment (RIA) is a relatively new tool that has been introduced into the legislative system of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia. To streamline its implementation, all three countries have decided to conduct a pilot RIA in a very similar area — administrative...

Event studies represent an increasingly popular method to evaluate (future) welfare effects of economic policy decisions. The basic idea is to hire the stock market as a referee, i.e. that stock market reactions to the announcement of policy decision are interpreted to contain superior...

The Honduran PRAF experiment randomly assigned conditional cash transfers to 40 of 70 poor municipalities, within five strata defined by a poverty proxy. Using census data, we show that eligible children were 8 percentage points more likely to enroll in school and 3 percentage points less likely...