Intermediaries helping individuals and rms with the government bureaucracy are common in developing countries. Although such bureaucracy intermediaries are, anecdotally,linked with corruption and welfare losses, few formal analyses exist. In our model, a government license can benet individuals....

In this paper, we warn on the overoptimistic conclusions led by weak instruments testing when good leverage points are present in the first stage of an IV estimation. Some simulations and an empirical application are provided to illustrate the point raised.

This paper describes the Stata implementation of Baltagi and Li's (2002) series estimator of partially linear panel data models with fixed effects. After a brief description of the estimator itself, we describe the new command xtsemipar. We then simulate data to show that this estimator performs...

Across African countries, prevention policies are unrelated to the prevalence of HIV/AIDS and, even in countries in which they were successful, these policies are often unstable or reversed. To explain these two puzzles, we propose a simple political economy model that examines how prevention...

We present a theory of endogenous formation of insurance groups which combines heterogeneity on agents' risk aversion under asymmetric information and lack of enforceability of contracts. Income sharing inside the group is decided by majority voting and the size of the group adjusts to this...

Asymmetric climate policies are expected to distort the level-playing field regarding international trade, singularly to the detriment of small open economies. The paper develops a flexible method that provides essential input regarding the design of offsetting measures at the sectoral level. It...

Daily collectors operate worldwide; they charge a fee in exchange for the collection of their client's deposits. The clients recover their savings after one month. With a negative nominal return of -3.3% per month, the service is quite expensive but nonetheless prevalent among the very poor. The...

We analyze the individualization of farm units in Mali in the sense of a transformation of purely collective farms into mixed units in which private plots coexist with collective fields. While a moral-hazard-in-team problem plagues production on the latter, a dilemma arises insofar as the...

In many African societies, beliefs in `occult forces' play a crucial role in mobilizing powerful social energies. Anthropologists, and more recently economists, have also stressed the importance of magico-religious practices in supporting redistributive norms and the important role played by...

Common wisdom as well as sound analytical arguments suggest that stronger punishment of deviant behavior meted out by a principal typically prompts the agents to better conform with his objectives. Addressing the specific issue of donor-beneficiary relationships in the context of participatory...