This paper studies the determinants of poverty dynamics in several rural areas from Madagascar. A particular attention is devoted to testing if rural poverty persistence in Madagascar could be explained by a vicious circle leading to a poverty trap. Annual poverty transitions retrieved from an...

This paper examines whether government ideology has influenced monetary policy in OECD countries. We use quarterly data in the 1980.1-2005.4 period and exclude EMU countries. Our Taylor-rule specification focuses on the interactions of a new time-variant index of central bank independence with...

In this paper a new method to estimate the equivalence scale elasticity using individual panel data on income satisfaction will be developed. In contrast to other subjective approaches, the present one benefits from the fact that no direct cardinal individual welfare function has to be...

This article contributes to the literature on innovation and development by identifying the determinants of innovation, and the role of intellectual property rights, in industrialized and developing countries. Controlling for sample selection, I find that, in general, the level of intellectual...

We link life-satisfaction data to inequality of the pre-government income distribution at the regional level, to estimate the degree of inequality aversion. In addition, we investigate whether a reduction in inequality by the state increases individual well-being. We find that Germans are...

Hospital heterogeneity is a major issue in defining a reimbursement system. If hospitals are heterogeneous, it is difficult to distinguish which part of the differences in costs is due to cost containment efforts and which part cannot be reduced, because it is due to other unobserved sources of...

This paper tackles the issue of cross-section dependence for the monetary exchange rate model in the presence of unobserved common factors using panel data from 1973 until 2007 for 19 OECD countries. Applying a principal component analysis we distinguish between common factors and idiosyncratic...

This article analyses an individual microcredit program developed in Rio’s shantytowns. We study its selection criteria and the determinants of borrowers’ repayment performance. More specifically, this work aims to study the link between informality and credit discipline. First, we question...

Using panel data from Argentina during the 1990’s, this paper concludes that, in Argentina, income ‘mobiles’ did change over time. Among the household variables with a structural relation with income dynamics, we find university education, protecting from income declines though not...