This paper contains a critical discussion of the opening of the highway concession to the private sector in Italy over the past 20 years. It describes the political context, legal mechanisms and regulatory settings; offers an analysis of the changes in the equity composition of concessionaires...

This research analyzes the success of the infrastructure projects financed by the World Bank, focusing on the causal link between the quality of project implementation and its outcome. The results show that the success of infrastructure projects depends fundamentally on the quality of...

This paper studies a transmission mechanism through which pro-vulnerable income transfers may affect individual decision-making of non-beneficiaries in an extreme poverty context, leading to labor supply contraction and the so-called dependency syndrome. The argument is based on the...

In absence of deposit insurance, underdeveloped financial systems can exhibit a coordination failure between banks, unable to commit on safe asset holding, and depositors, anticipating low deposit repayment in bad states. This paper shows conditions under which a government can solve this...

Financial regulation affects government revenue whenever it imposes both the mandatory quantity and price of government bonds. This paper studies a banking regulation adopted by the National Bank of Ethiopia in April 2011, which forces all private banks to purchase a fixed negative-yield...