Many developing countries find it difficult to raise the revenue required to provide such basic public services as education, health care, and infrastructure. Complicating the policy challenges of taxation in developing countries are issues that most developed countries do not face, including...

The main contribution of this paper with respect to previous work is the use of data on subjective perceptions to identify the Latin American middle classes. This paper provides a set of comparisons between objective and subjective definitions of middle-class using data from the 2007 World...

Most Latin American countries have ABC (acronyms from the Spanish words of voucher, mortgage and savings) designed social housing program. Little is known of the impacts of these programs. In this paper we estimate the welfare affects of twelve of these programs. We estimate whether the programs...

There are few reliable estimates of the effects of violence on economic outcomes. This study exploits the manifold increase in homicides in 2008-2011 in Mexico resulting from its war on organized drug traffickers to estimate the effect of drug- related homicides on housing prices. Using an...

In recent years the welfare state has come under attack from economists, and in many OECD countries there have been calls for spending on the welfare state to be rolled back. Critics argue that the size of transfer programs is responsible for a decline in economic performance and that cuts in...

With more than a billion people now living on less than a dollar a day, and with eight million dying each year because they are simply too poor to live, most would agree that the problem of global poverty is our greatest moral challenge. The large and pressing practical question is how best to...

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of seven aspects of rising inequality that are usually discussed separately: changes in labor’s share of income; inequality at the bottom of the income distribution, including labor mobility; skill-biased technical change; inequality among high incomes;...

This paper examines how the level and dispersion of self-reported happiness has evolved over the period 1972-2006. While there has been no increase in aggregate happiness, inequality in happiness has fallen substantially since the 1970s. There have been large changes in the level of happiness...

Abram Bergson has been making significant contributions to economic theory since the 1930s, and this selection of fifteen of his most influential essays exhibits in large part the breadth of his range. The book's primary focus, however, is on those aspects of economic theory to which he has...

The arms race continues to turn resources and priorities away from international development. Diminishing aid programs, growing Third World debt, a population that may reach 10 billion people in the foreseeable future in spite of all efforts to control it, increasing division of the world into...