While the financial analysis of a project focuses on matters of interest to investors, bankers, public sector budgets, etc., an economic analysis deals with the impact of the project on the entire society. The primary difference between the economic and financial evaluation is that the former...

This paper develops a dynamic framework to analyze the political sustainability of economic reforms in developing countries. First, we demonstrate that economic reforms that are proceeding successfully may run into a political impasse, with the reform's initial success having a negative impact...

We analyze the process of immigrant selection and occupational outcomes of International Medical Graduates (IMGs) in the US and Canada. We extend the IMG relicensing model of Kugler and Sauer (2005) to incorporate two different approaches to immigrant selection: employer nomination systems and...

This paper considers the macroeconomic implications of a set of empirical studies finding a high degree of dispersion in preferences for risk. It develops a model with risk aversion heterogeneity, uninsurable idiosyncratic income risk, and (with or without) self-selection into risky jobs to...

This paper estimates the fiscal burden of the Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) civil service pension systems that were closed in 2008 to new members in North Cyprus. At that time, a new pension system was introduced for the newly hired government employees and new private sector workers. Estimates are made...

This paper presents the first hedonic general-equilibrium estimates of quality-of-life and firm productivity differences across Canadian cities, using data on local wages and housing costs. These estimates account for the unobservability of land rents and geographic differences in federal and...

The economic cost of capital, as measured in Chapter 8, deals with the intertemporal comparisons. It links the annual flows of benefits and costs over a project's life to its initial capital investment. In the present chapter we deal with another facet of the act of raising project funds from...

This paper models two key roles of subjective performance evaluations: their incentive role and their feedback role. The paper shows that the feedback role makes subjective pay feasible even without repeated interaction, as long as there exists some verifiable measure of performance. It also...

Differences across decades in the counter-cyclical stance of fiscal policy can identify whether the growth in government spending affects output growth and so speeds recovery from a recession. We study government-spending reaction functions from the 1920s and 1930s for twenty countries. There...

In this paper, we analyze the asymmetric pure strategy equilibria in a dynamic game of pure information externality. Each player receives a private signal and chooses whether and when to invest. In some of the periods, only a subgroup of the players make decisions, which we call bunching, while...