This paper presents direct evidence on the quality of health care in low-income settings using a unique and original set of audit studies, where standardized patients were presented to a nearly representative sample of rural public and private primary care providers in the Indian state of Madhya...

It has been more than two decades since the widespread initiation of global power sector reforms and restructuring. However, empirical evidence on the intended microeconomic, macroeconomic, and quality-related impacts of reforms across developing countries is lacking. This paper comprehensively...

Survey data from 120 developing countries are used to examine the relation between establishment size and age in the formal sector. Existing research suggests that manufacturing establishments in developing countries do not grow over time, most likely because of market imperfections and...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the association between electronic filing (e-filing) and the total tax compliance costs incurred by small and medium size businesses in developing countries, based on survey data from South Africa, Ukraine, and Nepal. A priori, most observers expect...

In response to the Great Recession of 2008, many national governments implemented fiscal stimuli packages in 2009 and 2010 to prevent further declines in aggregate demand and to jump start their economic recovery. Where subnational governments responded with fiscal contraction, as in the United...

Household surveys in Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka were analyzed using a two-stage Heckman model to examine the factors influencing the decision to use liquefied petroleum gas (stage 1) and, among users, the quantity consumed per person (stage 2). In the first...

Eliciting subjective probability distributions in developing countries is often based on visual aids such as beans to represent probabilities and intervals on a sheet of paper to represent the support. The authors conducted an experiment in India that tested the sensitivity of elicited...

This paper analyzes the recent evolution and impact of the global economic crisis on the offshore services industry. Using a global value chains framework, the authors classify the offshore services sector in a comprehensive set of general and industry-specific activities that correspond to...

Some 25 years have elapsed since international financial institutions espoused a package of power sector reform measures that became known as the Washington Consensus. This package encompassed the establishment of autonomous regulatory entities, the vertical and horizontal unbundling of...

Biases from truncation caused by coresidency restriction have been a challenge for research on intergenerational mobility. Estimates of intergenerational schooling persistence from two data sets show that the intergenerational regression coefficient, the most widely used measure, is severely...