Decentralization of fiscal responsibilities has emerged as a primary objective on the agendas of national governments, and international organizations alike. Yet there is little empirical evidence on the potential benefits of this intervention. The authors fill in some quantitative evidence....

The authors develop a model of optimal growth to assess the risks of an HIV/AIDS epidemic and the expected economic impact in nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa region-Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yemen. The model incorporates an HIV/AIDS...

We develop a model of job search and use it to assess the effects that the Brazilian unemployment benefit system has on exit rates from unemployment. In our setup, unemployed workers receive job offers from the formal and informal sectors and decide whether to accept them or wait. Only jobs in...

This paper analyses the potential impacts of introducing unemployment insurance (UI) in middle income countries using the case of Malaysia, which today does not have such a system. The analysis is based on a job search model with unemployment and three employment sectors: formal and informal...

Given the prevalence of informal labor, most countries have combined contributory social insurance programs (pensions, unemployment benefits, and health insurance), with non-contributory insurance programs and several types of "safety nets." All of these programs involve different types of...

It is almost certain that the world economy is entering a recession of historic proportions; how bad things get will depend on how governments manage the Covid-19 pandemic. At the core of the problem lies a very difficult choice: whether to "flatten the curve" of the epidemic or whether to...

This paper presents the main results of three Discrete Choice Experiments designed to estimate youth preferences for different jobs attributes, and their willingness to pay for support services to access wage or self-employment. The experiments took place in urban areas in Kenya. We find that...

With an estimated 724 million extreme poor people living in developing countries, and the world's demographics bifurcating into an older North and a younger South, there are substantial economic incentives and benefits for people to migrate. There are also important market and regulatory...

Social protection systems in Latin America have been transformed in the past two decades. Until the 1980s, those who were not covered by the social security arrangements available primarily in the urban formal sector received little public assistance beyond universal subsidies for some food or...

This paper solves and estimates a stochastic model of optimal inter-temporal behavior to assess how changes in the design of the unemployment benefits and pension systems in Brazil could affect savings rates, the share of time that individuals spend outside of the formal sector, and retirement...