Travel time losses in the Netherlands are likely to get worse in the years ahead if capacity is not added to cope with the demand. This particularly creates problems for business travel, which is characterized by a high “value of time”. In the Netherlands, policy makers have a long-standing...

Privatization in India is mostly limited to the diffuse sale of minority stakes in firms. Since control rights have not been transferred to private owners it is widely contended that the process has had little impact on firm behavior. We find however that even the sale of minority stakes has a...

A number of private colleges and universities have chosen not to compete for students by offering merit-based financial aid. In addition, until 1990 many of these schools jointly calculated a student's financial need. I theoretically and empirically analyze the effects of different financial aid...

In developing countries, microfinance has been the darling of the development community, and in developed countries, microfinance fits well with Third Ways ideas. What are the challenges and opportunities for the attempt to replicate microfinance in the United States? This paper attempts to...

The past twenty-five years have seen a tremendous increase in interventions by state governments into local public service provision through mandates related to employee compensation and production processes and tax and spending limitations. Reflecting this phenomena, a substantial literature...

This paper studies an unusually comprehensive data-set of the universe of research groups that applied to an Italian 1989 93 research programme in biotechnology and bio-instrumentation. We develop a model to test whether past publications influence the expected grants obtained by the units in...

Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) are special savings accounts designed to help people build assets to reach life goals and to achieve long-term security. Account-holders receive matching funds as they save for purposes such as buying a first home, attending job training, going to college,...

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...

Based on the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) of firms in transition countries, which unbundles corruption to measure different types of corrupt transactions and provide detailed information on the characteristics and performance of firms, we find that: i)...