Is generalized debt relief an effective development strategy, or should assistance be tailored to countries'characteristics? To answer this question, the authors build a simple model in which recipient governments reveal their creditworthiness if donors offer them to choose between aid and debt...

We study how public disclosure of banks' risk exposure affects banks' risk taking incentives and assess the impact of the presence of informed depositors on the soundness of the banking system. We find that, when banks have complete control over the volatility of their loan portfolio, public...

As a means to reduce delays in public works implementation, a number of Brazilian states have recently reformed their procurement rules allowing contractor price proposals to be assessed before the technical evaluation of submitted bids is undertaken (in a procedure known as inversao das fases)....

When donors and recipients have different preferences over budgetary allocations, conditionality helps the implementation of donor-financed poverty reduction programs. If donors cannot perfectly monitor all recipients' actions, however, conditionality entails an inefficient allocation of...

This paper investigates, via an example, the effects of oligopolistic competition in a two-country two-good "Ricardian" model of international trade. By contrast, with results that apply to the competitive free-trade equilibrium, at the oligopoly equilibrium industries with different...