Using a novel dataset of accounting and market information that spans most publicly traded nonfinancial firms over the last century, we show that U.S. federal government debt issuance significantly affects corporate financial policies and balance sheets through its impact on investors’ portfolio allocations and the relative pricing of different assets. Government debt is strongly negatively cor...

Hundreds of studies have failed to establish the effects of decentralization on a number of important policy goals. This paper examines the remarkable case of Bolivia to explore decentralization’s effects on government responsiveness and poverty-orientation. I first summarize econometric results on the effects of decentralization nationally, and then turn to qualitative research – the focus of ...

Student achievement has been identified as an important contributor to economic growth. This paper investigates the relationship between redistributive government activities and investment in human capital measured by student performance in international comparative tests in Mathematics and Science during the period 1980 to 2003. In fixed effects panel models, government consumption, government...

This paper tries to explain the declining level of public investment in OECD countries. The theoretical framework hints to the relevance of a number of demand and supply factors – ranging from the yield of public investment to institutions like the EU deficit limits. The econometric results indicate that the decline is largely due to two developments: First to the pile-up of public debt since t...

The Center for Technology in Government (CTG) in collaboration with SAP, the business software solutions provider to public sector organizations, conducted a research project focusing on improving government’s ability to assess public returns on IT investments. The work conducted for this project and presented in this poster will be of particular interest to dg.o attendees since the project was...

India is much more integrated with the world economy. Both current and capital accounts are complementing to each other. The economic slowdown that appears to have begun in the USA in September, 2008 has some negative impact on Indian economy. The most immediate and adverse effect of this global financial crisis on India is an out flow of Foreign Institutional Investment (FII) from the capital ...

Secrecy about investment in research and development (R&D) can promote greater technological change and higher social welfare in competitive industries. In a duopoly where each firm has private information about its actual production technology (or cost) and firms engage in cost-reducing R&D with uncertain outcomesprior to engaging inprice competition, the equilibriumoutcomewhen firms do not ob...

Making capital and investment is the main driving forces of economic development. Based on the investment sensitivity to the changes of some of macro-economic variables and risk and uncertainty, the present study evaluated the effective factors on investment in private sector in Iran during 1980-2007. At first, the uncertainty variables of real informal exchange rate, nominal interest rate and ...

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of implicit government guarantees of Government-Sponsored Enterprises obligations. We construct a model with competitive housing and mortgage markets where the government provides banks with insurance against aggregate shocks to mortgage default risk. We use this model to evaluate aggregate and distributional impacts of this government subsidy to own...