We use experimental data from 35 randomly selected communities in Burundi to examine the impact of exposure to conflict on social-, risk- and time preferences. These types of preferences are important as they determine people’s propensity to invest and their ability to overcome social...

This paper challenges the idea that farmers revert to subsistence farming when confronted with violence from civil war. While there is an emerging macroeconomic consensus that wars are detrimental to development, we find contrasting microeconomic evidence. Using several rounds of (panel) data at...

This paper surveys the main lessons from impact evaluations of infrastructure projects, programs and policies relevant to policymakers. In the process, however, it also reveals some major research gaps of relevance to academics. After a brief discussion of the motivation for the explosion of the...

This paper asks whether revealing the identity of dropping bidders is in the interest of the auctioneer in an ascending price auction with asymmetric bidders and interdependent values. We show that revealing no information about bidders’ identities may increase the expected revenue. In this...

We modify the criterion by Bai and Ng (2002) for determining the number of factors in approximate factor models. As in the original criterion, for any given number of factors we estimate the common and idiosyncratic components of the model by applying principal component analysis. We select the...

We adopt a time-varying cointegration test to discriminate among different empirical studies claiming to find a stable Euro Area money demand equation. A time invariant relation explaining real balances is rejected by data, even when accounting for housing, financial and labour markets....

This paper tackles one of the most persistent criticism of patent statistics. Because not all inventions are patented, the patent-to-R&D ratio reflects both a productivity effect (the number of inventions created per unit of research input) and a propensity effect (the proportion of inventions...

This paper describes how we constructed a real time database for the euro area covering more than 200 series regularly published in the European Central Bank Monthly Bulletin, as made available ahead of publication to the Governing Council members before their first meeting of the month. We...

Survey data on expectations and economic forecasts play an important role in providing better insights into how economic agents make their own forecasts, what factors do affect the accuracy of these forecasts and why agents disagree in making them. Uncertainty is also important for better...