The geographic distance between a household and financial institutions may constitute a significant obstacle to achieving the benefits of modern financial institutions. We measure the impact of improved distance-related access to microcredits in Uzbekistan. Residents living closer to...

This paper applies three different methods widely used in the literature to track changes in shadow economic activity in Georgia following a drastic tax reform in 2005. The first method is a currency demand approach based on macro level data. The second and third methods rely on micro data from...

We develop an estimator of unreported income, perhaps due to tax evasion, that does not depend on as strict identifying assumptions as previous estimators based on microeconomic data. The standard identifying assumption that the self-employed underreport income whereas wage and salary workers do...

Measured rates of growth in real per capita income differ drastically depending on the data source. This phenomenon occurs largely because data sets differ in whether and how they adjust for changes in relative prices across countries. Replication of several recent studies of growth determinants...

The geographic distance between a household and financial institutions may constitute a significant obstacle to achieving the benefits of modern financial institutions. We measure the impact of improved distance-related access to microcredits in Uzbekistan. Residents living closer to...

Results of numerous cross-country growth regressions have been found to be sensitive to specification, time period or sample coverage. Several authors have observed that results may depend on the source and data collection methods for right-hand side variables. In this paper, we suggest that a...

Replication of two recent studies of growth determinants shows that results are sensitive to the choice of data from which growth rates are calculated, especially with respect to whether economic convergence has occurred. Previous warnings against using data that has been adjusted to increase...

Measurement of quality changes has proven to be an especially difficult aspect of calculating unbiased rates of inflation. We propose a new methodology of capturing quality improvements based on consumer focus groups and apply this methodology in an environment where quality changes might be...