This paper focuses on the role of "institutions" in the fight against poverty and inequality. Our view of institutions encompasses formal rules designed by polity (including those in the legal and economics sphere such as rules of property rights, contracts and liabilities) as well as informal...

This paper studies empirically the effects of and the interactions amongst economic and political liberalizations. Economic liberalizations are measured by a widely used indicator that captures the scope of the market in the economy, and in particular of policies towards freer international...

This paper examines whether growth regressions should incorporate dualism and structural change. If there is a differential across sectors in the marginal product of labour, changes in the structure of employment can raise aggregate total factor productivity. The paper develops empirical growth...

Several studies have identified the impact of trade liberalization in developing countries on the return to education within a Mincerian framework through a difference-in-difference estimator or with industry-level measures of trade openness. These studies have typically estimated the return to...

The international effort to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 has given fresh prominence to the idea of poverty traps, a notion that was widely current in the 1950s. This idea, most actively promoted by economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and...

The risk of political predation impedes the achievement of economic prosperity. In this paper, we analyze how the risk of predation evolves in different political regimes. Formally, we look at the interaction between a government and citizens in which, in each period, the government has an...

This study analyzes the effects of government policies on the short-run and long-run movement of locally owned firms from a developed country to a less-developed country and on the output and growth rate of each country in the presence of home bias. The analysis uses a model which was developed...