The magnitude of the public liabilities incurred as a result of the unprecedented government action in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and the consequences of exiting from the projected high debt scenario, have become a major source of concern about a future sovereign debt crisis....

There has been substantial research in recent years examining the regional evolution of economic growth across states in Mexico -- with a particular focus on the post North American Free Trade Agreement period. There is also a vast literature using cross-country regressions to examine...

The transformation of work during China’s rapid economic development is associated with a substantial but little noticed re-allocation of traditional farm labor among women, with some doing much less and some much more. This paper studies how the work, time allocation, and health of...

This paper examines the impact of firm productivity and local industrial structure on firm entry and exit in Morocco between 1985 and 2001. There is strong evidence of productivity exerting a market-cleansing role. Less productive firms are found to be more likely to exit - and locations with...

The authors use recent data from the 2006 National Family Health Survey of India to explore the relationship between religion and demographic behavior. They find that fertility and mortality vary not only between religious groups, but also across caste groups. These groups also differ with...

This paper analyzes the impact of infrastructure on growth of total factor productivity and per capita income, using both growth accounting techniques and cross-country growth regressions. The two econometric techniques yield some consistent and some different results. Regressions based in the...

Investment climate Surveys are valuable instruments that improve our understanding of the economic, social, political, and institutional factors determining economic growth, particularly in emerging and transition economies. However, at the same time, they have to overcome some difficult issues...

A recent trend in decentralization in several large and diverse countries is the creation of local jurisdictions below the regional level -- municipalities, towns, and villages -- whose spending is almost exclusively financed by grants from both regional and national governments. This paper...

Using enterprise data for the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS, this study examines the effects of corruption on productivity. Corruption is narrowly defined as the occurrence of informal payments to government officials to ease the day-to-day operation of firms. The effects...

This paper examines the extent to which dispute resolvers in customary law systems provide widely understandable justifications for their decisions. The paper first examines the liberal-democratic reasons for the importance of publicity, understood to be wide accessibility of legal...