This paper provides evidence for the effectiveness of performance pay to government workers and how performance pay interacts with demand-side information. In an experiment covering 145 child day-care centres, I implement three separate treatments. First, I engineer an exogenous change in...

Every minute, at least one woman dies from pregnancy and childbirth complications; a further 20 suffer injury, infection or disease. Despite medical advances, and years of policy declarations, this tragic situation remains particularly severe in developing countries, violating a fundamental...

The paper examines the heterogeneity with respect to the impact of a financial reform - Activity Based Financing (ABF) - on hospital efficiency in Norway. Measures of technical efficiency and of cost-efficiency are considered. The data set is from a contiguous ten-year panel of 47 hospitals...

This paper considers the implications of education and environment policy for growth in a model where the interactions between health, education, and the environment are taken into account. With respect to previous works, in which one of these three dimensions is omitted, we consider their...

In this paper I estimate the relationship between school quality and mortality. Although many studies have linked the quantity of education to health outcomes, the effect of school quality on health has yet to be examined. I construct synthetic birth cohorts and relate the quality of education...

Ageing populations are a major challenge for most developed countries, where social security systems were developed in the post war period. It has been suggested that the costs of caring for the ageing population places a considerable strain on individuals, as well as on the public purse, and...

The dominance of English common-law countries in prospects for financial development in the legal-origins debate has been debunked by recent findings. Using exchange rate regimes and economic/monetary integration oriented hypotheses, this paper proposes an “inflation uncertainty theory” in...

With this work we try to analyse the agglomeration process in the Portuguese regions, using the New Economic Geography models. This work aims to test, also, the Verdoorn Law, with the alternative specifications of (1)Kaldor (1966), for the 28 NUTS III Portuguese in the period 1995 to 1999. It is...

This work aims to test the Verdoorn Law, with the alternative specifications of (1)Kaldor (1966), for five Portuguese regions (NUTS II) from 1986 to 1994. It is intended to test, also in this work, the alternative interpretation of (2)Rowthorn (1975) of the Verdoorn's Law for the same regions...

Building on standard growth-theory models, this paper provides an empirical investigation of the effects of crime on regional economic performance in Italy, as measured by labour productivity growth. Our analysis relies on a panel of annual data on the Italian regions and, contrary to previous...