infonet-economy

Does the government control of school systems facilitate equality in school quality? Whether centralized or localized control produces more equality depends not only on what ‘could’ happen in principle, but also on what does happen in practice. We use the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) database to examine the association between school sector and the variance...

This paper presents an impact evaluation of three nutritional programs implemented in Puebla, Mexico, run by SEDIF, a social assistance institution. The present study uses both a propensity score matching and weighting in order to balance the treatment and the control groups in terms of observable characteristics, and to estimate, later on, the causal effect of the programs on...

Microfinance has played a key role in including the poor in financial markets. This paper uses microfinance data to approximate financial inclusion in the poorer segments of the population and proposes a quantile regression approach to study the development of microfinance markets. Our approach accounts for the dynamic and heterogeneous impacts that key drivers may have across...

A growing share of the world population is getting access to a formal bank account. This allows a move from cash to account based payments. Grounding our hypothesis in behavioral economics, we conjecture that being paid on an account instead of in cash can play a major role in encouraging savings. When paid on the account, the money is saved by default, while - as long as payments...

This paper shows that debt crises do not always have a fiscal nature and suggests that fiscal retrenchment may not be the optimal response to a crisis that did not originate from irresponsible fiscal policies. The paper starts by discussing the origin of debt crises and the unexplained part of public debt and for avoiding debt explosions linked to financial crises or poor debt...

This article examines the procurement of goods and services by multilateral organisations from suppliers, based on a panel data including industrialised countries and emerging economies over 11 years. It presents the results of an empirical study – the first of its kind – on the explanatory factors of variations between countries, which are mainly attributable to such factors as the...

This paper studies how minimum wage policies affect firm employment in China using a unique county level minimum wage data set matched to disaggregated firm survey data. We investigate both the effect of imposing a minimum wage, and the effect of the policies that tightened enforcement in 2004. We find that the average effect of minimum wage changes is modest and positive, and that...