This paper provides empirical evidence on the effect of high-speed internet on financial technology and banking in Africa. Our test combines data on 551 banks and 28,171 firms with the staggered arrival of bre-optic submarine cables in Africa. High-speed internet promoted private-sector lending...

While expanding public investment can help filling infrastructure bottlenecks, scaling up too much and too fast often leads to inefficient outcomes. This paper rationalizes this outcome looking at the association between cost inflation and public investment in a large sample of road construction...

While expanding public investment can help filling infrastructure bottlenecks, scaling up too much and too fast often leads to inefficient outcomes. This paper rationalizes this outcome looking at the association between cost inflation and public investment in a large sample of road construction...

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...