Being closer to the poor, NGOs are widely believed to provide better targeted aid than state agencies. But empirical evidence is largely lacking. We contribute to closing this gap by drawing on an exceptionally detailed Swiss database that covers different forms of NGO aid and several official...

Even though the industrial revolution started in Europe, many commentators suggest that European entrepreneurship has become an oxymoron. The facts of the case are, however, growing against them. For instance, Europeans nowadays run a fair share of Silicon Valley companies. Examples include...

This paper provides a brief analysis of three major questions raised in the context of the recent global financial crisis. First, how similar is the crisis to previous episodes? We argue that the crisis featured some close similarities to earlier ones, including the presence of credit and asset...

This paper investigates the causes of the shortfall in private R&D expenditure of the EU compared to the US. It shows that differences in the structure of the two economies play only a minor role in explaining the R&D gap. Instead, the European R&D shortfall is mainly caused by a negative...

France has seen a marked deterioration in its export performance in the last 10 years or so. Previous empirical research pointed out that weak export performance was due to i) vigorous domestic demand; ii) lower mark-ups due to head-to-head competition with Germany; iii) low non-price...

This paper examines the effects of recent welfare reforms in the US and UK on the well-being of children in low-income families, looking specifically at the effects on poverty, family expenditures, and child health and development. The paper finds some commonalities but also some notable...

Following Bai (2004) and Bai and Ng (2004) we estimate a common factor representation of a panel of output series for India, disaggregated by 15 states and 14 broad industry groups. We find that a single common V-Factor accounts for a large part of the significant shift in the cross-sectional...

Even though some countries track students into differing-ability schools by age 10, others keep their entire secondary-school system comprehensive. To estimate the effects of such institutional differences in the face of country heterogeneity, we employ an international...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...