During economic crises, governments often increase fiscal spending to stimulate the economy. While the fiscal spending surge may be temporary, spending composition is often altered in favor of expenditures on social programs and other public goods which may persist over time. We model and...

This working paper empirically documents the size of (2) in the rural sector and investigates its consequences for rural development (agricultural growth, patterns of growth and rural poverty) for ten Latin American countries over 1985-2000. The paper provides econometric evidence suggesting...

Political economy factors tend to induce many governments to spend on private goods (non-social subsidies) to the detriment of spending on social and public goods. We show that this bias in spending patterns is particularly costly for economic growth when capital markets are imperfect. We thus...

Interest-rate subsidies have been used to stimulate commodity stockholding, with the intention of stabilizing prices. However, reductions in price variability can be achieved at less government cost using a direct storage subsidy, and it is possible that an interest-rate subsidy will increase...

This paper systematically examines the role of fiscal policy, trade and energy taxes on environmental quality in Europe using disaggregated data for 12 European countries over the 1995-2008 period. It uses a methodology that obtains estimates mostly free of time-varying omitted variable biases....

This paper studies the interactions between harvesters, whose income depends on a renewable natural resource as a key factor of production (e.g., fisheries) and industries that can have important impacts on the renewable resource, but whose production does not depend on it (e.g., off-shore oil...