Governments face many constraints when making taxation decisions, including revenue needs, political objectives, and administrative capacities. Tariffs have an appealing combination of features for politicians: they provide a stream of revenue that is easy to collect, as well as satisfying...

During the 1990's, Mexico successfully implemented a program of economic reforms and free trade aimed at a complete restructuring of its economy. Surprisingly, the reform process seems to have had little impact on unemployment. An analysis of trends indicates that, even in the worst years of...

The national budget affects life and death via its allocations in areas such as traffic safety, flood control, public health and the like. When the cost-effectiveness of an intervention is evaluated, common effect measures are the number of lives extended (saved) and the expected lifeyears...

By the end of 1999 HIV/AIDS was present in at least 200 countries and approximately 34.3 million people were living with the disease, 5.3 million of whom had been infected in that year alone (WHO 2000). Approximately 21.8 million persons had died from AIDS by 2000 and countries where life...

Comment offrir à aux entreprises, en particulier les petites, une évaluation individualisée de leur qualité, leur permettant, d’une part, de mieux gérer leurs projets et leur développement et, d’autre part, de signaler leur qualité aux tiers, dont les banques. Le problème...

This paper analyzes the impact of voucher design on student sorting, and more specifically investigates whether there are feasible ways of designing vouchers that can reduce or eliminate student sorting. It studies these questions in the context of the first five years of the Milwaukee voucher...

This paper is made up of two interrelated parts. Part I contains a critical evaluation of the so called StemWijzer 2002, an internet application that helped and advised voters which political party to choose at the Dutch, German and Suisse parliamentary elections. Applying some validity tests...

Most insurance premiums are only weakly linked to mileage, and have largely lump-sum characteristics. The probable result is too many accidents and too much driving from the standpoint of economic efficiency. This paper develops a model of the relationship between driving and accidents that...

Open source software development has organizational characteristics that are out of the ordinary (e.g., flatter hierarchy, self-organization, self-regulation, and no ownership structure). The study suggests that this organization of work can be explained by combining the recently developed...

This paper develops a proxy measure of the inequality of influence on the basis of survey evidence from 2002 Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) conducted among 6,500 firms in 27 transition countries. We refer to the resulting inequality as crony bias in the political...