What determines the technology that a country adopts? While there could be many factors, the efficiency of the country's financial system may play a significant role. To address this question, a dynamic contract model is embedded into a general equilibrium setting with competitive...

The fast growth and wide range of applications of blockchain (BC) technology in various industries is irrefutable. Generally, BC technology is still in at an infant stage but it has generated significant interests in many sectors and industries. Nonetheless, despite an uptake of interest on the...

Many incentive programs rely on local agents with significant discretion to allocate benefits. We estimate the degree of discretion exercised by teachers within a conditional transfer program designed to improve nutrition and encourage student attendance in Mumbai, India. The program allocates...

Very little empirical evidence exists on the relationship between intellectual property rights and innovation. Existing studies tend to be indirect and do not consider the influence of IPRs on innovation per se; nor do they adequately allow for the endogeneity of IPRs. Correcting for these...

Between March and August 2005 Niger was hit by a doubling of millet prices and a sharp rise in the number of severely malnourished children admitted to feeding centres. The extent and causes of such crisis remain controversial. The paper reviews the evidence in this regard in the light of the...

In this paper, the differences between two variations of proportional representation (PR), open-list PR and closed-list PR, are analyzed in terms of their ability to accurately reflect voter preference. The single nontransferable vote (SNTV) is also included in the comparison as a benchmark. We...