In Europe differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s have been due chiefly to the generosity of welfare state programs - increasing happiness going with increasing generosity and declining happiness with declining generosity. This is the principal...

This paper uses a large cross-country survey of business firms to assess their influence on government policies. It is found that influence is associated with larger, government-owned firms that have a high degree of ownership concentration. In contrast, foreign ownership matters little. It is...

The paper aims to examine the role of institutions relative to economic policy and geography in explaining the differential level of development across countries over time. To that end, it attempts to construct a Development Quality Index (DQI) and an Institutional Quality Index (IQI) by using...

The paper uses nonparametric methodology to examine the role of institutions in understanding differential levels of development across countries. This technique estimates first order derivatives for every country allowing a deeper look into the impact of institutions on development. The...

In China, the male-biased sex ratio has increased significantly. Because the one-child policy only applied to the Han Chinese but not to minorities, this unique affirmative policy allows us to identify the causal effect of the one-child policy on the increase in sex ratios by a...

Several empirical studies are concerned with measuring the effect of currency and current account crises on economic growth. Using different empirical models this paper serves two aspects. It provides an explicit assessment of country specific factors influencing the costs of crises in terms of...

Ethnic fragmentation is a variable increasingly used in the economic literature to explain differences in economic development level, growth or the incidence of conflicts. Nearly all articles have in common that they treat ethnic fragmentation as a static, exogenous fact. Only recently some...

This paper studies the impact of human capital on the adoption and diffusion of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) in the Pakistani firms using the World Bank Enterprise Survey 2002-07. The paper considers various indicators of human capital and measures of ICT adoption and...

This study reports evidence from an unusual policy intervention – The Reaching Out of School Children (ROSC) project – in Bangladesh where school grants and education allowances are offered to attract hard-to-reach children to schools comprised of a single teacher and a classroom. The...

We analyse the role of mass violent conflict in influencing individual expectations. We hypothesise that individuals are likely to report negative expectations if they were exposed to conflict events in the past. We combine individual and household level data from the Northern Uganda Livelihood...