The paper examines empirically the question of whether more unequal societies spend more on income redistribution than their more egalitarian counterparts. Theoretical arguments on this issue are inconclusive. The political economy literature suggests that redistributive spending is higher in...

Islam proposes the replacement of an interest-based financial system with one which operates on the basis of risk and profit sharing. Using a general equilibrium model, this paper investigates some open-economy implications of the adoption of Islamic banking for growth and stabilization of the...

This Supplement describes how the staff proposes to achieve further synergies by mapping the DQAF into the metadata structure of the DQP's other key component: (3) the data transparency initiatives comprising the Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS) and General Data Dissemination System (GDDS)

Over the past decade, the United States has been very successful atcreating jobs. Some other industrial countries have clearly lagged behind. But what is the reason why some countries are more successful than others at creating employment? Are there common factors that explainjob creation? This...

This paper identifies the countries that meet the enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative's income and indebtedness eligibility criteria based on end-2004 data. It also updates the status of these countries toward qualifying for debt relief and presents cost estimates of debt...

We analyze labor market models where the law of one price does not hold-that is, models with equilibrium wage dispersion. We begin by assuming workers are ex ante heterogeneous, and highlight a flaw with this approach: if search is costly, the market shuts down. We then assume workers are...

Using Chilean data, we document that for resource-rich small open economies the effects of terms of trade shocks on the wage gap (between skilled and unskilled workers) depend on factor intensities in the non-tradable sector, following the model in Galiani, Heymann, and Magud (2010). For a...