Using cross–country and Peruvian data, I show that victims of misfortune, particularly crime victims, are much more likely than non–victims to bribe public officials. Misfortune increases victims’ demand for public services, raising bribery indirectly, and also increases victims’...

What explains the varying responses by Thai governments to changes in the international economic environment over time. To answer this the paper emphasizes the link between the nature of the political structure/policymaking environment and the government’s reform capacity. Thailand’s...

Despite rapid economic growth and poverty reduction, inequality in Chile has remained high and remarkably constant over the last 20 years, prompting academic and public interest in the subject. Due to data limitations, however, research on inequality in Chile has concentrated on the national and...

Based on a principal-agent model, this paper investigates the organizational structure that made the El Salvador's primary school decentralization program (EDUCO program) successful. First, we employ the "augmented" reduced form educational production function by incorporating parents and...

What are the determinants of economic reform efforts? This paper tries to throw light on this question by examining recent reforms in Brazil, a country which followed a gradualist approach and was a late-starter among Latin American economies. We argue that these first generation reforms (trade...

Is there any interrelationship between firm level FDI in the form of cross border Mergers & Acquisitions and capital markets growth and quality? We addressed this question using panel data of cross border M&A for nine emerging economies. Our study period goes from 1987 to 2006. We find that the...

This paper analyzes the main uncertainty of college saving - the child's ability - in the context of the saving with learning model. The first section develops a dynamic model combining asset accumulation and learning to explain the parents' forward-looking saving behavior when they are...

This paper considers estimation methods and inference for linear dynamic panel data models with unit-specific heterogeneity and a short time dimension. In particular, we focus on the identification of the coefficients of time-invariant variables in a dynamic version of the Hausman and Taylor...

Over the past two decades, Germany experienced several periods of banking system instability rather than full-blown banking system crises. In this paper we introduce a continuous and forward-looking stability indicator for the banking system based on information on all financial institutions in...

We propose a novel, multilaterally consistent productivity approach-based indicator to assess the international price competitiveness of 57 industrialized and emerging economies. It is designed to be a useful assessment tool for monetary policy authorities and, thereby, differs from previously...