Financial intermediaries may increase economic efficiency through intertemporal risk smoothing. However without an adequate regulation, intermediation may fail to do this. This paper studies the effects of a production shock in a closed economy and compares abilities of market-based and...

The present paper measures the impact of an educational demand-and-supply side policy in a developing country, Benin. This West African country has introduced in 2006 a program to eliminate school fees, build schools and recruit teachers. The data used are the National Demographic and Health...

This paper summarizes our recent research on evaluating the distributional consequences of social programs. This research advances the economic policy evaluation literature beyond estimating assorted mean impacts to estimate distributions of outcomes generated by different policies and determine...

We examine Singapore's fairly homogeneous private-housing market and show that new apartments on historical multi-century leases trade at a non-zero discount relative to property owned in perpetuity. Descriptive regressions indicate that new apartments with 825 to 986 years of tenure remaining...

The guide outlines the main evaluation challenges associated with ALMP s, and shows how to obtain rigorous impact estimates using two leading evaluation approaches. The most credible and straightforward evaluation method is a randomized design, in which a group of potential participants is...

This paper documents the effects of an intervention on knowledge sharing, in which information embedded in efficient private organizations is used to improve bureaucratic procedures of public agencies. In particular, it analyzes the impact of the Knowledge for Results (K4R) program on the...

We examine the effect of California Paid Family Leave (CPFL) on young women's (less than 42 years of age) labor force participation and unemployment. CPFL enables workers to take at most six weeks of paid leave over a 12 month period in order to bond with new born or adopted children, or to care...

Independent and high-quality evaluations of government policies are an important input for designing evidence-based policy. Lack of incentives and institutions to write such evaluations, on the other hand, carry the risk of turning the system into a costly beauty contest. We study one of the...

We consider an overlapping generations model with two production factors and two types of agents in the presence of financial intermediation and its application to the Russian default of August 1998. The paper focuses on the analysis of the consequences of a sudden negative repayments shock on...

Equilibrium paths in economies of overlapping generations depend on the frequency of trade. In a logarithmic example, determinacy obtains as the frequency of trades tends to infinity or trade occurs in continuous time. If time extends infinitely into the infinite past as well as into the...