Provision of safe drinking water, adequate sanitation and personal hygiene are vital for the sustainable environmental conditions and reducing the incidence of diarrhoea, malaria, trachoma, hepatitis A & B and morbidity levels. Not having access to water and sanitation is a courteous expression...

We estimate the long-term effect of public R&D on growth in manufacturing by analyzing new data from the Cold War era Space Race. We develop a novel empirical strategy that leverages US-Soviet rivalry in space technology to isolate windfall R&D spending. Our results demonstrate that public R&D...

Since 1980, US wage growth has been fastest in large cities. Empirically, we show that most of this urban-biased growth reflects wage growth at large Business Services firms, which are also the most intensive users of information and communications technology (ICT) capital in the US economy. We...

This paper focuses on the role of interregional technology spillovers in the process of industrial growth in Chinese regions in the period 1990-2005. Inflows of FDI increased rapidly from 1990 till 1998, slowing down thereafter. Domestic R&D investment accelerated after 1998. Regional industrial...

We investigate the persistence of levels of self-employment and new business formation in different time periods and under different framework conditions. The analysis shows that high levels of regional self-employment and new business formation tend to be persistent for periods as long as 80...

We investigate the relationship between corruption and political stability, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. We propose a model of incumbent behavior that features the interplay of two effects : A horizon effect, whereby greater instability leads the incumbent to embezzle more...

The effects of inter-government fiscal arrangements on variation in regional economic growth are analyzed for Russia, a country with large cross-regional differences and considerable fiscal redistribution. Moreover, fiscal reforms implemented in the first half of 2000s, which followed to some...

We develop a framework to estimate the economic value of a recent zoning reform in the city of Sao Paulo, which altered maximum permitted construction at the city-block level. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, we find that developers file for more multi-family construction permits...

In applied historical research, geographic units often differ in level of aggregation across datasets. One solution is to use crosswalks that associate factors located within one geographic unit to another, based on their relative areas. We develop an alternative approach based on relative...