What determines the foreign aid effort of donor countries? We review the existing literature on donors' aid budgets and examine which of the suggested variables robustly determine aid effort, measured as Official Development Assistance (ODA) as a share of gross national income. More...

The literature on patent buyouts has focused on single-economy settings, where buyouts are welfare improving relative to patents unless there are frictions such as imperfect information or commitment problems. We expand the analysis to a world with two heterogeneous countries featuring different...

This paper argues against the common-sense conclusion that climate change demands a global market-based solution, such as international emissions trading. First, current experience suggests global cooperation is not necessary for initial mandatory actions. Second, when domestic targets vary...

Momentum may be building for federal climate change policy in the United States. Assuming this leads to mandatory greenhouse gas regulations, the door will be open for the United States to constructively re-engage other countries concerning an international climate regime. Such a regime will...

This paper argues that while a long-term solution to climate change may require the global market-based solution envisioned in the Kyoto Protocol, a more flexible near-term approach is necessary. First, a broad range of domestic policies need to be embraced and encouraged by an international...

We used 2008 DHS data sets to construct child height- and weight-for-age Z-scores and used regression analysis to analyze the effects of different sources of drinking water and sanitation on child health outcomes in Nigeria. We also calculated the probability of a child being stunted or...

Income-based as well as most existing multidimensional poverty indices (MPI) assume equal distribution within the household and thus are likely to lead to yield a biased assessment of individual poverty, and poverty by age or gender. In this paper we first show that the direction of the bias...

Starting from a representative welfare function, this paper developed a simple method to endogenously specify the weights for the Human Development Index (HDI), and finds that the current equal-weighted HDI significantly biases down the weight of life expectancy. The weights proposed by this...

There is no consensus on how to measure interpersonally comparable, cardinal utility. Despite of this, people repeatedly make welfare evaluations in their everyday lives. However, people do not always agree on such evaluations, and this is one important reason for political disagreements. Thus,...

This paper concerns optimal emissions of greenhouse gases when catastrophic consequences are possible. A numerical model is presented which takes into account both continuous climate-feedback damages as well as the possibility of a catastrophic outcome. The uncertainty in the model concerns...