Survey data from 10 OECD countries are used to model household water demand. Statistically significant results include: (1) an inelastic average price response is estimated for every country; (2) households not charged volumetrically consume more water than households that are; (3) household...

Sector Wide Approaches (SWAps) are an approach to aid management that aim to support recipient government leadership. Health aid has grown rapidly in the past 20 years and in this time SWAps have become an important health aid delivery approach. However, the empirical evidence is that the...

This paper offers a fresh insight into the performance and reform opportunities of the formal health system of Papua New Guinea. A central tenant of this paper is that the historically imposed and continuing top-down nature of the formal health system in PNG is not capitalizing on potentially...

Steve Pollard, known in the Pacific as a government employee, researcher, consultant, and donor staffer, recently retired from the ADB. He has almost 30 years' experience working toward the interests of better policy for better livelihoods in the Pacific, almost 40 years' experience in...

Using both panel and cross-sectional models for 28 industrialized countries observed from 2001 to 2009, we report a number of findings regarding the determinants of the volatility of returns on cross-border asset holdings (i.e., equity and debt). Greater portfolio concentration and an increase...

We estimate a three-country model using 1995-2013 data for Germany, the Rest of the Euro Area (REA) and the Rest of the World (ROW) to analyze the determinants of Germany’s current account surplus after the launch of the Euro. The most important factors driving the German surplus were positive...

This paper studies the behavior of a central bank that seeks to conduct policy optimally while having imperfect credibility and harboring doubts about its model. Taking the Smets-Wouters model as the central bank’s approximating model, the paper’s main findings are as follows. First, a...

New Zealand's economic reforms beginning in 1984 have been one of the most radical and comprehensive programme of structural adjustment amojng OECD countries. This paper provides an empirical assessment of how New Zealand's production structure has changed since the early 1970s. The methodology...

The Black framework offers a theoretically appealing way to model the term structure and gauge the stance of monetary policy when the zero lower bound of interest rates becomes constraining, but it is time consuming to apply using standard numerical methods. I outline a faster Monte Carlo...

We propose that the formation of beliefs be treated as statistical hypothesis tests, and label such beliefs inferential expectations. If a belief is overturned through the build-up of evidence, we assume agents switch to the rational expectation. We build a state dependent Phillips curve, and...