infonet-economy

Worldwide, an estimated 200 million girls and women have been subjected to female genital cutting. Female genital cutting is defined as an intentional injury to the female genitalia without medical justification. The practice occurs in at least 29 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In addition, globalization and migration have brought immigrants from countries where...

Recent years have seen a large expansion in the use of rigorous impact evaluation techniques. Increasingly, public administrations are collaborating with academic economists and other quantitative social scientists to apply such rigorous methods to the study of public finance. These developments allow for more reliable measurements of the effects of different policy options on the...

Traditional corporatist groups such as business groups and unions still play an important role in many countries, and the rumors exaggerates the decline of corporatist structures. Nevertheless citizen groups have grown in number and political importance. We show that Danish and Swiss citizen groups have gained better access to the administrative and the parliamentary venues in the...

To reduce poverty and food insecurity in Africa requires raising productivity in agriculture. Systematic use of fertilizer and hybrid seed is a pathway to increased productivity, but adoption of these technologies remains low. We investigate whether the quality of agricultural inputs can help explain low take-up. Testing modern products purchased in local markets, we find that 30% of...

This paper evaluates the effects of awarding vouchers for vocational training on the employment outcomes of unemployed voucher recipients in Germany, as well as the potential mechanism through which they operate. This study assesses the direct effects of voucher assignment net of ac¬tual redemption, which may be driven by preference shaping and learning about possible human capital...

Russia’s new Concept of the State Migration Policy until 2025 (the CSMP) was approved on 13 June 2012. As the first comprehensive, nationwide document on migration policy in the modern history of Russia, it marks the beginning of a decisive reform of the country’s migration policy by departing from the existing focus on temporary foreign workers. The emphasis of the CSMP is on...

Insurance contracts may fail to perform, leading to a total or partial default on valid claims. We extend models of such probabilistic insurance to allow for ambiguity in contract nonperformance risk, and derive formally that mean-preserving ambiguity reduces demand. The results of a field lab experiment are consistent with this logic. In particular, we find that a 10 percent...

The disclosure of the VW emission manipulation scandal caused a quasi-experimental market shock in the observable quality of VW diesel vehicles. We consider a classical model for adverse selection and sorting to derive an empirically testable hypothesis about the impact of observable quality on the supply of used cars. We test the hypothesis with data collected from an online car...