To what extent did the colonial public policy influence the current regional inequalities in the French- speaking West Africa? This paper uses the differences in development outcomes across the areas of the former French West Africa to show the existence of colonial long term effects on...

This paper explores the impact of elections on economic policies and governance in developing countries. We distinguish between a structural effect, which increases accountability, and a cyclical effect which may be disruptive. Since the effects are offsetting, neither can be analyzed in...

Did colonization change the distribution of prosperity within French-speaking West Africa? Using a new database on both pre-colonial and colonial contexts, this paper gives evidence that Europeans tended to settle in more prosperous pre-colonial areas and that the European settlement had a...

In this paper, we investigate the interactions between public debt and transfer policies in a framework based on Floden [2001], that we extend to allow for transitional dynamics between steady states. First, we show that, starting from a high level of public debt, it is possible to implement a...

This paper reconsiders the impact of public debt in an economy with heterogeneous households and incomplete markets to emphasize the short-run effects of an increase in public debt. As compared to models that rest on steady-state analysis, we show that the welfare gains of a public debt increase...

The main objective of this paper is to study the relationship between external public debt and equilibrium real exchange rate in developing countries. Using a extension of Obstfeld & Rogoff (1995) model we show that debt overhang tend to appreciate real exchange rate in the long run (Krugman...

This paper analyses the effects of transitory increases in government spending when public debt is used as liquidity by the private sector. Aggregate shocks are introduced into an incomplete-market economy where heterogenous, infitely-lived households face occasionally binding borrowing...