Estimations of the size and development of the shadow economy for 145 countries, including developing, transition and highly developed OECD economies over the period 1999 to 2003 are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (as a percent of official GDP) in 2002/03 in 96 developing...

Our objective is to analyse the role of teacher and school quality to explain differences in students' educational outcomes. With this aim, we use PISA microdata for 10 middle income and 2 high income countries and we apply decomposition methods in order to identify the role of these factors for...

The evidence suggests that relational contracting and legal rules play an important role in credit markets but on the basis of the prevailing field data it is difficult to pin down their causal impact. Here we show experimentally that relational incentives are a powerful causal determinant for...

We study theoretically and empirically how consumers in an individual private longterm health insurance market with front-loaded contracts respond to newly mandated portability requirements of their old-age provisions. To foster competition, effective 2009, the German legislature made the...

This paper examines the impact on TFP in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and in other developing countries (DEV) of trade-related foreign R&D (NRD), education and governance. The measures of NRD are constructed based on industry-specific R&D in the North, North-South trade patterns, and...

We exploit organizational reforms in a foreign-owned bank in Central-East Europe to study the implementation of modern HRM policies in an emerging market context. We have branch-level data and use our knowledge of the process that led to the adoption of the reforms to implement two estimators...

Previous studies have suggested that more liberal abortion laws should lead to a decrease in marriage rates among young women as 'shotgun weddings' are no longer necessary. Empirical evidence from the United States lends support to that hypothesis. This paper presents an alternative theory of...

From a theoretical perspective the link between the speed and scope of rapid labor reallocation and productivity growth or income inequality is ambiguous. Do reallocations with more flows tend to produce higher productivity growth? Does such a link appear at the expense of higher income...