Unlike what is commonly believed, the last two decades have not witnessed the twilight of industrial policy. Instead, incentives and subsidies have been refocused on exports and direct foreign investment, in the belief that these activities are the source of significant positive spillovers. The...

This paper examines whether trust is an investment decision under uncertainty, based on the expectation of trustworthiness, and whether trustworthiness is reciprocity, conditional on one's counterpart's behavior. In experiments run in Russia, South Africa and the United States, we find that only...

For too long, environmental policymaking has relied on trial and error, without adequate or systematic learning from either the trials or the errors. Systematic program evaluation research has been remarkably scarce relative to the overall number of environmental policies adopted in the United...

We present a method for evaluating the welfare of a decision maker, based on observed choice data. Unlike the standard economic theory of revealed preference, our method can be used whether or not the observed choices are rational. Paralleling the standard theory we present a model for choice...

Recent empirical research on emerging markets debt, currency crises and fiscal sustainability has placed a significant focus on the role of currency mismatches with the emphasis placed on the currency composition of explicit government liabilities. The key insight of this paper is that these...

There is a large literature on legal transitions, mostly focusing on the allocation of the cost of legal change in areas such as taxation and the taking of property by eminent domain. Another literature looks at precedent and rules, exploring the legal system’s own internal constraints on...

This paper examines, theoretically and empirically, the determinants of collective success in the maintenance of infrastructure projects. The empirical analysis employs primary data collected by the author on 132 community-maintained infrastructure projects in Northern Pakistan. Determinants are...

We examine a rapidly emerging regulatory approach that we label "management-based regulation." Management-based regulation shifts the locus of policy discretion from the government regulator to the regulated entity. Government directs private firms to incorporate public goals into their...

This paper extends the well-studied phenomenon of interviewer effects (race-, gender-, and ethnicity-of-interviewer) to the yet unexamined domain of language-of-interview. Using data from the 1989-1990 Latino National Politics Survey, the paper finds that the answers that survey respondents give...

The paper begins by arguing that globalization, which here means reductions in the remaining barriers to international trade, still has a long way to go. Next it briefly reviews the evidence on the economic benefits from globalization, followed by a consideration of the non-economic effects in...