Through the Hartz reforms, German active labour market policy was fundamentally restructured and has since been systematically evaluated. This paper reviews the recent evaluation findings and draws some conclusions for the future setup of active labour market policies in Germany. It argues in...

How should monetary policy respond to changes in financial conditions? In this paper we consider a simple model where firms are subject to idyosincratic shocks which may force them to default on their debt. Firms' assets and liabilities are denominated in nominal terms and predetermined when...

This paper presents a simple model capturing differences between debt and equity finance to examine how financial structure matters for macroeconomic volatility. Debt finance is relatively cheap in the sense that debt holders need to verify relatively few profitability states, but debt finance...

We conduct a theoretical and empirical investigation of the impact of bankruptcy codes on firms’ capital-structure choices. In our theoretical framework, costs of financial distress are endogenously determined as a function of the bankruptcy code. Anticipated liquidation values emerge as the...

We conduct the first systematic evaluation of the world’s largest community-based development program--China’s flagship poverty alleviation program began in 2001 which finances public investments in designated poor villages based on participatory village planning. We use matching methods and...

Evaluations of new infrastructure in developing countries typically focus on direct effects, such as the impact of an electrifification program on household energy use. But if new infrastructure induces people to move into an area, other local publicly provided goods may become congested,...

Evaluating the impact of transport infrastructure meets a major challenge since rail lines are not randomly located. We use the natural experiment offered by the opening and progressive extension of the Regional Express Rail (RER) between 1970 and 2000 in the Paris metropolitan region, and in...

The construction of large dams is one of the most costly and controversial forms of public infrastructure investment in developing countries, but little is known about their impact. This paper studies the productivity and distributional effects of large dams in India. To account for endogenous...

This paper considers the incentives of oligopolistic firms to diversify into technologically related markets when there are diseconomies of scope. There is a rent-extraction incentive for firms to adopt flexible technologies, which enable them to enter technologically related markets, thereby...

We study a general equilibrium model where agents' preferences, productivity and labour endowments depend on their health status, and occupational choices affect individual health distributions. Efficiency typically requires agents of the same type to obtain different expected utilities if...