Financial intermediaries may increase economic efficiency through intertemporal risk smoothing. However without an adequate regulation, intermediation may fail to do this. This paper studies the effects of a production shock in a closed economy and compares abilities of market-based and...

We examine the effect of California Paid Family Leave (CPFL) on young women's (less than 42 years of age) labor force participation and unemployment. CPFL enables workers to take at most six weeks of paid leave over a 12 month period in order to bond with new born or adopted children, or to care...

The present paper measures the impact of an educational demand-and-supply side policy in a developing country, Benin. This West African country has introduced in 2006 a program to eliminate school fees, build schools and recruit teachers. The data used are the National Demographic and Health...

This paper explores methodological approaches that can be used to monitor and evaluate climate change adaptation initiatives at the projects and programme levels. It examines approaches that have been used in other areas of development practice to see what lessons have been learned that can...

This paper summarizes our recent research on evaluating the distributional consequences of social programs. This research advances the economic policy evaluation literature beyond estimating assorted mean impacts to estimate distributions of outcomes generated by different policies and determine...

We examine Singapore's fairly homogeneous private-housing market and show that new apartments on historical multi-century leases trade at a non-zero discount relative to property owned in perpetuity. Descriptive regressions indicate that new apartments with 825 to 986 years of tenure remaining...

Independent and high-quality evaluations of government policies are an important input for designing evidence-based policy. Lack of incentives and institutions to write such evaluations, on the other hand, carry the risk of turning the system into a costly beauty contest. We study one of the...

This paper documents the effects of an intervention on knowledge sharing, in which information embedded in efficient private organizations is used to improve bureaucratic procedures of public agencies. In particular, it analyzes the impact of the Knowledge for Results (K4R) program on the...

I study whether saving behavior reveals socially relevant intertemporal preferences. To this end, I decompose the present generation’s preference for the next into its dynastic and cross-dynastic components in a model of saving. If people are concerned about the next generation as such, then...

We analyze the role of "the" utility discount rate and its implications to generation-specific and societal altruism and egoism, respectively, in a neoclassical framework. It is worked out clearly, that two different utility discount rates have to be distinguished: An (inverse)...