In the past three decades, emerging countries have gone through extensive decentralization reforms. Yet, there are no studies assessing quantitatively the relative importance of various factors known to affect the success of decentralization. This paper builds on a comprehensive dataset the...

Summary Is informal employment a safety net or a growth engine? To address this question, this paper studies the trends and cycles of informal employment. It first presents a theoretical model of long- and short-run behavior of informal labor. Then it analyzes these relationships empirically,...

Despite the tremendous human suffering caused by natural disasters, their effects on economic growth remain unclear, with some studies reporting negative, and others indicating no or even positive effects. To reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings reported in the literature, this study...

type="main" xml:id="ecpo12026-abs-0001" <p>This article builds on a comprehensive dataset for Peru that merges municipal fiscal accounts with information about municipalities’ characteristics such as population, poverty, education, and local politics to analyze the leading factors affecting the...</p>

This paper builds on a comprehensive dataset for Peru that merges municipal fiscal accounts with information about municipalities’ characteristics such as population, poverty, education and local politics to analyze the leading factors affecting the ability of municipalities to execute the...

This paper studies the trends and cycles of informal employment. It first presents a theoretical model where the size of informal employment is determined by the relative costs and benefits of informality and the distribution of workers'skills. In the long run, informal employment varies with...

Why in many economies households and firms borrow and make deposits in foreign currency? Expanding on the existing literature, our framework addresses this question allowing for interest rate differentials and access to foreign funds to play a role in explaining this process of asset...

Do public sector employees earn less than their counterparts in the private sector? This paper addresses this question in the case of Peru, a country where civil service reform is being debated yet the only available empirical studies on wage differentials date back to the late 1980s. Using data...

Soaring commodity prices in 2007 and 2008 raised concerns that volatility was also rising, which would have implications for welfare and therefore for the design of public policy interventions. The literature focuses on trends in commodity prices rather than their volatility characteristics....