Social impact investors, philanthropists, or corporations pursuing social responsibility try to demonstrate that they are indeed"doing good."This essay classifies the various types of measures that currently exist to capture social and environmental impact in a simple scheme. It argues that...

Numerous studies predict that developing countries with low human capital may not benefit from the strengthening of intellectual property rights. The authors extend an influential theoretical framework to highlight the role of intellectual property rights in the process of innovation and...

This paper argues that the increased flow and management of knowledge permitted by knowledge-based capital, supported by appropriate policies, can be an important factor in reducing the decision risk facing enterprises due to uncertainty and imperfect information, helping improve the resilience...

This paper builds on previous studies to uncover evidence suggesting that cyclical fluctuations in returns to schooling are determined by fluctuations in foreign demand, which tend to be positively correlated with returns to schooling. The effect of export fluctuations (driven by changes in...

This is a background paper to the 2014 World Development Report. Risk is inherent to the pursuit of opportunity. This paper surveys the recent literature and looks at the risks and opportunities firms and their workers face in the global value chains. First, it examines the risk-sharing...

Under financial constraints, exporting may have less to do with productivity and more to do with financial resources. The established relationship between exporting and productivity would differ when examined through the lens of the working capital needs of the firm. The hypothesis that working...

This paper develops a simple model to analyze the interaction between strategic corporate public good provision, international firm location and national regulation. An information-based strategic corporate public good provision mechanism is proposed to shed light on recent firm behavior within...

This paper examines the conceptual foundations of macroprudential policy by reviewing the literature on financial frictions from a policy perspective that systematically links state interventions to market failures. The method consists in gradually incorporating into the Arrow-Debreu world a...

This paper explores the conceptual foundations of macroprudential policy. It does so within a framework that gradually incorporates and interacts two types of frictions (principal-agent and collective action) with two forms of rationality (full and bounded), all in the context of aggregate...

Although transfer of agricultural land ownership through land reform had positive impacts on productivity, investment, and political empowerment in many cases, institutional arrangements in West Bengal -- which made tenancy heritable and imposed a prohibition on subleasing -- imply that early...