Social benefits can potentially play an important role in protecting the poor and minimizing the impacts of an economic crisis. While many studies estimate the impacts of a crisis, there is little evidence of the actual response of social safety nets to systematic shocks. This study traces the...

In a crisis, do employers place the burden of adjustment disproportionately on female employees? Relying on household and labor force data, existing studies of the distributional impact of crises have not been able to address this question. This paper uses Indonesia's census of manufacturing...

This paper evaluates the impact of strengthening legal rights on the types of economic opportunities that are pursued. Ethiopia changed its family law, requiring both spouses'consent in the administration of marital property, removing the ability of a spouse to deny permission for the other to...

The authors investigate the theoretical effects of lobbying and pressure group activities on both economic efficiency and on equity. Looking at lobbying as a political activity that takes place alongside production, they find that lobbies may generate economic inefficiency as part of the process...

The explosion of informal entrepreneurial activity during Mongolia's transition to a market economy represents one of the most visible signs of change in this expansive but sparsely populated Asian country. To deepen our understanding of Mongolia's informal sector during the transition, the...

In 1989, the former communist countries embarked on a transition from centrally planned command economies to market economies (and from repressive dictatorships to Western-style democracies). In addressing the question,"What is the optimal strategy for this transformation?", the author revisits...

Greater trade integration has often been viewed as requiring greater standardization in institutions, without which the benefits of trade do not materialize. There are many current debates concerning the degree and area of standardization needed and these debates are likely to continue for the...

Providing a more complete framework for assessing the efficiency of government intervention requires moving away from the idealistic perspective typically found in the normative approach to traditional public economics, contend the authors. Such a move requires viewing the government not as a...

The authors analyze the role of institutions in resolving systemic banking crises for a broad sample of countries. Banking crises are fiscally costly, especially when policies like substantial liquidity support, explicit government guarantees on financial institutions’ liabilities, and...

The remarkable performance of the Irish economy in recent years has attracted much attention. Within a 10-year period the economy went from an 18 percent unemployment rate to nearly full employment, while the ratio of debt to GDP fell from 120 percent to less than 50 percent. Inevitably, this...