Discounting future costs and benefits is a crucial yet contentious practice in the appraisal of long-term public projects with environmental consequences. The standard approach typically neglects that ecosystem services are not easily substitutable with manufactured goods and often exhibit...

Corporations make significant direct contributions to environmental improvement and also indirect contributions, through expenditure on process and product innovation. We explore alternative motivations for these expenditures that look beyond the assertion that they are a consequence of business...

Discounting has to take account of ecosystem services in consumption and production. Previous literature focuses on the first aspect and shows the importance of the relative price effect, for given growth rates of consumption and ecosystem services. This paper focuses on intermediate ecosystem...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

This paper examines whether the federal structure of aid-receiving countries matters in explaining aid effectiveness. Following the decentralization theorem, the devolution of powers should increase aid effectiveness, since local decision-makers are better informed about local needs. At the same...

Institutions are important for proper economic performance, but are replaceable by trust or other social norms. We show that when proper institutions and trust are missing, integrity of the individuals can replace them. We construct a model of a transactions-based economy with contracts...