The costs associated with unhealthy food consumption are not only paid by those suffering from overweight but by all members of society in terms of higher costs for social security systems. With this in mind, we study the effectiveness of a tax, a subsidy and cash incentives in reducing...

This paper examines the effect of automatic grade promotion on academic achievement in 1,993 public primary schools in Brazil. A difference-in-differences approach that exploits variation over time and across schools in the grade promotion regime allows the identification of the treatment effect...

Weak institutions are shown to create scope for public banks to play a growth-promoting role, even if such banks are less efficient than private banks.

This paper surveys the literature dealing with the thesis put forward by Dooley, Folkerts-Landau and Garber (DFG) that the present constellation of global exchange-rate arrangements constitutes a revived Bretton-Woods regime. DFG also argue that the revived regime will be sustainable, despite...

Qualitative business survey data are used widely to provide indicators of economic activity ahead of the publication of official data. Traditional indicators exploit only aggregate survey information, namely the proportions of respondents who report “up” and “down”. This paper examines...

We generalise and extend the work of Inarra and Laruelle (2011) by studying two person symmetric evolutionary games with two strategies, a heterogeneous population with two possible types of individuals and incomplete information. Comparing such games with their classic homogeneous version with...

We present a modified citizen-candidate model where the implemented policy arises from a compromise between the government and an unelected external power. We show that the two-candidate equilibria of this model differ significantly from the original: however small the cost of candidacy, the...

This paper provides a theoretical model for explaining the separation of ownership and control in fi rms. An entrepreneur hires a worker for providing effort to complete a project. The worker's effort determines the probability that the project is completed on time, but the worker receives...

We consider a general economy, where agents have private information about their types. Types can be multi-dimensional and potentially interdependent. We show that, if the realized frequency of types (the exact number of agents for each type) is common knowledge, then a mechanism exists, which...

The method of instrumental variables (IV) and the generalized method of moments (GMM), and their applications to the estimation of errors-in-variables and simultaneous equations models in econometrics, require data on a sufficient number of instrumental variables that are both exogenous and...