The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is a massive piece of legislation that was enacted on the heels of the most significant financial crisis of modern time. It was aimed at avoiding a depression. The provisions of the Act were aimed at calming the panic that had gripped investors...

Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction as the engine of capitalist development is well-known. However, that the destructive part of creative destruction is a social cost and therefore biases our estimate of the impact of the innovation on NNP and on welfare is hardly acknowledged, with the...

Cross-country growth regressions have become an increasingly common tool in empirical development research. But these regressions typically do not attempt to distinguish among countries in different stages of development. Two empirical methods are used to test for such differences. Several of...

Is aid subject to diminishing returns? This paper addresses this issue, thereby contributing to the literature on effective allocation of aid. We test the hypothesis of diminishing returns to aid. Using an appropriate econometric technique for detecting thresholds, we find that aid only becomes...

Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction as the engine of capitalist development is well-known. However, that the destructive part of creative destruction is a social cost and therefore biases our estimate of the impact of the innovation on NNP and on welfare is hardly acknowledged, with...

We present cross-country evidence that a country's macroeconomic volatility, measured either by the standard deviation of output growth or the occurrence of trend-growth breaks, is significantly affected by the country's historical variables. In particular, countries with longer histories of...

Keynesian monetary and fiscal policies have served as the fundamental government reaction to economic hardship since the development of Keynesian economic theory. With Keynesian policies having a major impact on economic outcomes, the success and effectiveness of these policies must be...

Interventions designed to support small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are popular among policy makers, given the role SMEs play in job creation around the world. Business support interventions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are often based on the assumption that market failures and...

Donor agencies and recipient governments want to assess the effectiveness of aid-supported sector policies. Unfortunately, existing methods for impact evaluation are designed for the evaluation of homogeneous interventions (‘projects’) where those with and without ‘treatment’ can be...