This paper reviews the process of job creation and destruction across a sample of 16 industrial and emerging economies over the past decade. It exploits a harmonized firm-level data set drawn from business registers and enterprise census data. The paper assesses the importance of technological...

Regional inequalities represent a continuing development challenge in most countries, especially those with large geographic areas. Globalization heightens these challenges because it places a premium on skills: since rich regions typically also have better educated and better skilled labor, the...

In many markets, industry and policymakers agree that there may be too many insurers. In others, the consensus is that there could be benefit from more competition. But this broad consensus is often supported by evidence that is more qualitative, anecdotal, or judgmental despite being...

The carrying capacity of our natural environment is an important unpriced input to production. A consensus is growing that users should pay for the environmental damage that they cause. Although most people can accept this policy in principle, many are concerned with magnitude and incidence of...

The collective approach to household behavior relaxes the restrictive features of the unitary model by specifying household welfare as a weighted combination of the individuals'utilities. But the weights are assumed fixed or exogenous to the analysis. The authors extend the collective approach...

Universities in Latin America are increasingly considered instruments of social and economic development and face rising expectations in regard to supplying relevant skills, undertaking applied research, and engaging in commercial activity. The paper discusses trends and challenges within Latin...

The black market foreign exchange premium is an important implicit tax on exports, creating a conflict between the fiscal goal of financing government spending with a limited menu of tax instruments and the allocative goal of stimulating exports. In this paper, the premium is solved for in a...

In the late 1980s, Chile planned to privatize Santiago's sanitary works enterprise (EMOS) but instead reformed it under public ownership. It did so through a regulatory framework that mimicked the design of a concession with a private utility, setting tariffs that ensured at least a seven...

The case study on the U.S. Treasury Direct examines the evolution of the electronic distribution systems for marketable and nonmarketable government securities, the main objectives, and the basic legal infrastructure and the preconditions enabling the system. The U.S. experience highlights that...

In the course of trade-policy reforms, countries must confront at least two important questions with respect to tariffs. First, what is the optimal structure of tariffs? In particular, is it optimal to tax all imports at a uniform rate? Second, should intermediate inputs be subject to import...