Independent and high-quality evaluations of government policies are an important input for designing evidence-based policy. Lack of incentives and institutions to write such evaluations, on the other hand, carry the risk of turning the system into a costly beauty contest. We study one of the...

This paper presents a data set that improves the measurement of educational attainment for a broad group of countries. We extend our previous estimates of educational attainment for the population over age 15 and over age 25 up to 1995 and provide projections for 2000. We discuss the estimation...

Our panel data set on educational attainment has been updated for 146 countries from 1950 to 2010. The data are disaggregated by sex and by 5-year age intervals. We have improved the accuracy of estimation by using information from consistent census data, disaggregated by age group, along with...

We study the long-run implications of regional and ethnic favoritism in Africa. Combining geocoded individual-level survey data from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) with data on national leaders’ birthplaces across 41 African countries, we explore the educational attainment of adults...

We study the economic implications of regional favoritism, a form of distributive politics that redistributes resources spatially within countries. We use a large sample of enterprise surveys spanning across many low and middle income countries, and utilize transitions of national political...

In this paper, we study the extent to which ministers engage in regional favoritism. We are the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of a larger set of the governing elite, not just focusing on the primary leader. We hand-collect birthplaces of this governing elite globally. Combining this...

The "true" size of fiscal multipliers is widely debated by economists and policy makers as large (small) multipliers provide arguments to expand (cut) public spending. Within a meta-analytical framework, we ask whether the large observed variance in multiplier estimates can be explained by the...

For U.S. annual data that include WWII, the estimated multiplier for temporary defense spending is 0.4-0.5 contemporaneously and 0.6-0.7 over two years. If the change in defense spending is "permanent" (gauged by Ramey's defense-news variable), the multipliers are higher by 0.1-0.2. The...

Optimal debt management can be thought of in three stages. First, if taxes are lump sum and the other conditions for Ricardian equivalence hold, then the division of government financing between debt and taxes is irrelevant, and the whole level of public debt is indeterminate from an optimal-tax...