Increasing returns to schooling and rising inequality are well documented for industrial countries and for some developing countries. The growing demand for skills is associated with recent technological developments. The authors argue that computers in the workplace represent one manifestation...

The success of the Indian software industry is now internationally recognized. Consequently, scholars, policymakers, and industry officials everywhere generally anticipate the increasing competitiveness of India in high technology activities. Using a structural framework, the author argues that...

A decade long experience shows that monitoring the performance of public and private monopolies in South America is proving to be the hard part of the reform process. The operators who control most of the information needed for regulatory purposes have little interest in volunteering their...

Transparency -- sunshine -- is often touted as a core element of the governance agenda, and one that is most important in environments with low transparency to begin with. In a provocative paper published in the American Political Science Review, Edmund Malesky, Paul Schuler, and Anh Tran...

The empirical literature on environmental performance or compliance has followed two strands: one based on the impact of formal regulation as a means of inducing better environmental performance, and another centered on the role of informal regulation which mainly emphasizes the role of...

The authors present a measure of jointness to explore dependence among regressors in the context of Bayesian model selection. The jointness measure they propose equals the posterior odds ratio between those models that include a set of variables and the models that only include proper subsets....

Until recently, most economists viewed the household as a collection of individuals who behave as if in agreement on how best to combine time and goods (purchased or produced at home) to produce commodities that maximize some common welfare index. This model has been extended far beyond standard...

The authors consider two alternative methods of forecasting real per capita GDP at various horizons: 1) univariate time series models estimated country by country; and 2) cross-country growth regressions. They evaluate the out-of-sample forecasting performance of both approaches for a large...

This paper finds that a 1 percent reduction in the cost of exporting or the cost of international transport is associated with an export diversification gain of 0.3 percent or 0.4 percent respectively. Lower domestic market entry costs can also promote diversification, but the elasticity is...

Recently, interest in regionalism has mushroomed, and economists have analyzed it not only from the viewpoint of trade but that of foreign investment, macroeconomics, and political economy. But questions of technological regionalism -whether the accumulation and diffusion of technology has a...