Do public sector employees earn less than their counterparts in the private sector? This paper addresses this question in the case of Peru, a country where civil service reform is being debated yet the only available empirical studies on wage differentials date back to the late 1980s. Using data...

This paper uses a novel dataset on United States food import refusals to show that reputation is an important factor in the enforcement of sanitary and phytosanitary measures. The strongest reputation effect comes from a country's own history of compliance in relation to a particular product....

This paper proposes two new indices of relative deprivation, derived from an extension of the concept of the generalized Gini for the measurement of distributional change. Population- and income-weighted relative deprivation indices are then defined and, using panel data from the Consortium of...

This paper empirically investigates whether households affected by income shocks cope by reducing human capital investments. The analysis uses Crisis Response Surveys conducted in Armenia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Turkey during 2009 and 2010. A propensity score matching technique is...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the number of documents required to export and import and the time it takes to complete all procedures to trade. It shows that an increase in the number of documents required for export and import tends to increase the time cost of shipments. However,...

Measurement of the middle class has recently come to the center of policy debate in middle-income countries as they search for the potential engines of growth and good governance. This debate assumes, first, that there is a meaningful definition of class, and second, that thresholds that define...

Not only do Africa's fragile states grow more slowly than non-fragile states, but they seem to be caught in a"fragility trap". For instance, the probability that a fragile state in 2001 was still fragile in 2009 was 0.95. This paper presents an economic model where three features -- political...