The study of labor market segmentation and the estimation of the deadweight loss due to policy distortions reflected in wage structures require analyses of labor force surveys. These data are increasingly available in most countries. But evaluations of labor market reforms are uncommon. The lack of documented labor market reforms may reflect the difficulty of reducing wage distortions by direct...

The paper examines the recent reforms of health insurance in Chile and Argentina. These partially replace social health insurance with individual insurance administered through the private sector. In Chile, reforms in the early 1980s allowed private health insurance funds to compete for affiliates with the social health insurance system. In Argentina, reforms in the 1990s aim to open up the uni...

Given the problematic nature of attempts to reform national delivery systems for health care, the paper reviews the context and logic of reforms in the health sector. After a background on approaches to building capacity within three generations of public sector reforms, it examines the reforms applied to financing, organizing and delivering health services and suggests strategies for reform th...

This paper starts with a theoretical discussion on the relationship between performance and accountability in public organizations with a special focus on administrative reforms. Accountability theory is discussed and related to different aspects of performance. How ambiguous is the relationship between accountability and performance? Do different types of accountability relate to different asp...

Malpractice reforms tend to reduce physician liability for harming patients. Because these reforms are passed at the state level, the costs of harming patients vary widely by geographic location. In this paper, I test whether malpractice reforms affect where physicians choose to practice and whether physicians who relocate in response to reforms are particularly prone to commit malpractice. Bec...

Businesses and pro-business interest groups have often claimed that the litigation environment in the states influences their decisions about where and how to do business. However, very little empirical evidence exists to suggest that these claims are anything more than anecdotal. This study attempts to fill that void. I employ a triple-differences identification strategy in which businesses in...

Capitalizing on the most recent estimates of agricultural border protection in China and in other countries, this paper assesses the economic and poverty impact of global trade reform in China. It also examines the interplay between the trade reforms and factor market reforms aimed at improving the allocation of labor within the Chinese economy. The results suggest that trade reforms in the res...

We estimate the effect of pension reforms on households’ expectations of retirement outcomes and wealth accumulation decisions exploiting a decade of pension reforms as a source of exogenous variation in expected pension wealth. Two parameters are crucial to estimate pension wealth: the age at which workers expect to retire and the expected ratio of pension benefits to pre-retirement income. Th...

Structural reforms that increase competition in product and labor markets may have large effects on the long-run level of output. We find that, in a medium scale DSGE model, a 10 percent reduction in product and labor markups increases output by nearly 7 percent after 5 years. The short-run transmission of these reforms, however, depends critically on the presence of the zero lower bound (ZLB)....

Abstract: The policy reforms in Moroccan agriculture brought about through the process of structural and sectoral adjustment and the engagements undertaken by Morocco in the context of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) represent important milestones in Moroccan agricultural history. Since 1985, reforms have been undertaken, especially with respect to domestic agricultural market...