This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of state-owned banks and also presents some new results and a robustness analysis. The paper shows that state-owned banks located in developing countries have fiscal costs because they are characterized by lower returns than...

This paper will present the Modern Money Theory approach to government finance. In short, a national government that chooses its own money of account, imposes a tax in that money of account, and issues currency in that money of account cannot face a financial constraint. It can make all payments...

We extend the standard evaluation framework to allow for interactions between individuals within segmented markets. An individual's outcome depends not only on the assigned treatment status but also on (features of) the distribution of treatments in his market. To evaluate how the distribution...

Consider an observed binary regressor D and an unobserved binary variable D*, both of which affect some other variable Y. This paper considers nonparametric identification and estimation of the effect of D on Y , conditioning on D* = 0. For example, suppose Y is a person's wage, the unobserved D...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of market-based approaches in the provision of public-sponsored training programs. In particular, we study the link between training quality and labor earnings using a Peruvian program that targets disadvantaged youths. Multiple proxies for training quality...

This paper discusses the nonparametric identification of causal direct and indirect effects of a binary treatment based on instrumental variables. We identify the indirect effect, which operates through a mediator (i.e. intermediate variable) that is situated on the causal path between the...

In the current paper, the finite-sample stability of various implementations of the KPSS test is studied. The implementations considered differ in how the so-called long-run variance is estimated under the null hypothesis. More specifically, the effects that the choice of kernel, the value of...

Virtually every survey today suffers from nonresponse to some extent. To counter this, survey administrators and researchers have a host of methods at their disposal, many of which are both expensive and time consuming. Reduction efforts, aiming at reducing the nonresponse rate, are an important...