Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are important for employment and economic activity; however, they are perceived to lack adequate financing, which hampers their growth. As a consequence, governments have implemented a number of programs to foster SME lending and attention has focused on...

In this paper, we study development in a panel of 87 countries from 1970 to 2005. We focus on characterizing institutionally driven heterogeneities in the development effects of macroeconomic policies and on comparing the development process as measured by GDP to that measured by the Human...

The goal of this paper is to provide a preliminary overview of empirical Capability Approach (CA) applications for high-income OECD countries. The survey aims at a basis of mutual exchange on relevant CA issues among researchers analyzing well-being in affluent countries. It focuses on CA...

It is commonly believed that the response of the price of corn ethanol (and hence of the price of corn) to shifts in biofuel policies operates in part through market expectations and shifts in storage demand, yet to date it has proved difficult to measure these expectations and to empirically...

Better managers and managerial practices lead to better firm performance. Yet, little is known about what happens when managers move across firms. Does a firm hiring a good manager improve its performance? If yes is there some valuable knowledge the manager has acquired and successfully diffused...

This paper identifies the mechanism through which financial crises exert long-term negative effects on output. Theory suggests that a shortfall in productivity-enhancing investments temporarily slows technological progress, creating a gap between pre-crisis trend and actual GDP. This hypothesis...

We provide evidence that lower fertility can simultaneously increase income per capita and lower carbon emissions, eliminating a trade-off central to most policies aimed at slowing global climate change. We estimate the effect of lower fertility on carbon emissions accounting for the fact that...

We show that demand side cash subsidies to care recipients alter both caregiving and intergenerational transfer decisions. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment referring to the inception of a universal caregiving allowance (in 2007 and its reduction in 2012). We find a caregiving subsidy (of a...

One of the intended effects of an integrated network of long-term care (LTC) services lies in the reduction of (unnecessary) health care utilisation. This paper draws upon the quasi-experimental evidence from Spain to examine the causal effect of the expansion of affordable long-term care (LTC)...

We use an excludable instrument to test the effect of bilateral foreign aid on economic growth in a sample of 96 recipient countries over the 1974-2009 period. We interact donor government fractionalization with a recipient country's probability of receiving aid. The results show that...