This paper assesses the effect of institutional quality on research and development (R&D) expenditures in developing countries. The paper finds that the risk of expropriation and the rule of law are correlated with R&D expenditures. Since both institutional variables increase as institutional...

The authors discuss the use of imputed data in regression analysis, in particular the use of highly disaggregated welfare indicators (from so-called"poverty maps"). They show that such indicators can be used both as explanatory variables on the right-hand side and as the phenomenon to explain on...

Knowledge accumulation means either new knowledge (an increase in its quality), greater access to existing knowledge (an increase in its quantity), or both. The authors examine the relative contribution of these two components of knowledge to total factor productivity (TFP) for North-North and...

Many more impact evaluations could be done, and at lower unit cost, if evaluators could avoid the need for baseline data using objective socio-economic surveys and rely instead on retrospective subjective questions on how outcomes have changed, asked post-intervention. But would the results be...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the number of documents required to export and import and the time it takes to complete all procedures to trade. It shows that an increase in the number of documents required for export and import tends to increase the time cost of shipments. However,...

"The Impact of Microcredit on the Poor in Bangladesh: Revisiting the Evidence,"by David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch (2014) (henceforth RM) is the most recent of a sequence of papers and web postings that seeks to refute the findings of the Pitt and Khandker (1998; henceforth PK) article"The Impact...

Studies comparing household surveys with on-site interceptor surveys have typically accounted for over-sampling avid users in the on-site interceptor surveys (that is, endogenous stratification). However, these studies have typically not accounted for the possibility that the household sample...

The oil shocks of the 1970s, which quadrupled the price of petroleum, marked the end of an abnormal period of price stability and renewed interest in predicting the evolution of commodity prices. But most subsequent studies have focused on the short-run effects of price fluctuations, mainly...

Using UNESCO data for research and development (R&D) expenditures and personnel, the authors document international differences in R&D activities and assess the determinants of these differences and the link between R&D and economic growth. For a group of OECD countries, R&D activity and...

This paper introduces a computationally efficient method for estimating structural parameters of dynamic discrete choice models with large choice sets. The method is based on Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood (PPML) regression, which is widely used in the international trade and migration...