This paper studies peer effects on student achievement among first graders randomly assigned to classrooms in Tennessee's Project STAR. The analysis uses previously unexploited pre-assignment achievement measures available for 60 percent of students. Data are not missing at random, making...

In many countries that have decentralized, improving the accountability of local officials is increasingly emphasized to make them more responsive to their constituents' needs. This paper provides evidence that the public announcement of performance ratings can induce local governments to become...

Many developing countries exhibit imbalanced spatial development, but corrective policies are hampered by lack of adequate sub-regional development data. Building on the insights of the factor price equalization theorem and by applying measures of spatial autocorrelation on land values, patterns...

There is a heated debate in the US, Canada and many European countries about introducing universally accessible child care. However, studies on universal child care and child development are scarce and only consider short-run outcomes. We analyze the introduction of universal child care in...

We analyze the dynamic effect of prices and price volatility on current oil production, both on the level of country groups and the major individual producer countries. A comprehensive dataset at monthly frequency allows us to include a rich lag structure while controlling for key global and...

Two conversion schemes are usually employed for assessing personal-income inequality from household equivalent incomes: to weight household units by size or by needs.Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, we show the sensitivity of country inequality rankings to conversion schemes and...

In this paper, we argue that the effect of governance on the emergence of crimes of different levels of sophistication is highly non-linear. State failure, anarchy and a lack of infrastructure are not conducive to establishing any business, including illicit enterprises. At the bottom of the...