Well-functioning institutions matter for economic development. In order to operate effectively, public institutions must also inspire confidence in those they serve. The authors use data from the Gallup World Poll, a unique and very large global household survey, to document a quantitatively...

This paper uses a large cross-country dataset to empirically examine factors associated with sovereign defaults on external private creditors and expropriation of foreign direct investments in developing countries since the 1970s. In the long run, sovereign defaults and expropriations are likely...

Incomes in the poorest two quintiles on average increase at the same rate as overall average incomes. This is because, in a global dataset spanning 118 countries over the past four decades, changes in the share of income of the poorest quintiles are generally small and uncorrelated with changes...

This paper estimates the effect of government investment on private investment in a sample of 39 low-income countries. Fluctuations in a predetermined component of disbursements on loans from official creditors to developing country governments are used as an instrument for fluctuations in...

Social welfare functions that assign weights to individuals based on their income levels can be used to document the relative importance of growth and inequality changes for changes in social welfare. In a large panel of industrial and developing countries over the past 40 years, most of the...

A number of recent studies have empirically documented links between characteristics of World Bank projects and their ultimate outcomes as evaluated by the World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group. This paper explores the in-sample and out-of-sample predictive performance of empirical models...