The primary purposes of this paper are to (1) consider the justifications that have been offered for housing subsidies to low-income households and the implications of these justifications for the evaluation and design of housing programs, (2) describe the most important features of the largest...

Many incentive programs rely on local agents with significant discretion to allocate benefits. We estimate the degree of discretion exercised by teachers within a conditional transfer program designed to improve nutrition and encourage student attendance in Mumbai, India. The program allocates...

Global banks are changing. With a new set of rules come new business models. We review the international dimension of the financial crisis, centring on cross-border losses and cross-currency funding problems that prompted authorities to adopt wide-ranging rescue measures and liquidity...

In Italy taxation on incomes in the agricultural sector is based mainly on a cadastral criterion introduced over two centuries ago. Special treatment for incomes in this sector is common to many developed countries, although the tax bases are periodically revised. In Italy average cadastral...

We evaluate the impact of two school feeding schemes on health outcomes of pre-school age children in Burkina Faso: school meals which provide students with lunch each school day, and take home rations which provide girls with 10kg of cereal flour each month, conditional on 90% attendance rate....

This paper evaluates the Diagnostic Program in Spain which is a publicly funded program to promote internationalization of companies located in Andalusia (south of Spain). The methodology used is the propensity score-matching. The treatment group consists of companies which participated in the...

This paper provides an analytical framework to examine the relative efficiencies of a revenue-neutral biofuel subsidy and a gas tax in the presence of pre-existing distortions and growing substitutability between fuels. Both policies are set to achieve a targeted reduction in gasoline use at the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between banking development and the size of shadow economies by employing data on 137 countries over the period from 1995 to 2007. Both cross-sectional and panel analysis suggest that an improvement in the development of the...

Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) provide supplemental services to urban commercial corridors using funds from member assessments. They have become a very popular urban revitalization tool, but their formation is still largely unexplained. Theory implies that BIDs will form if they add to...

We present empirical evidence suggesting that the effect of the host country corporate tax rate on the debt ratio of multinational affiliates in developing economies is positive and larger than the same effect for affiliates in developed economies.