This paper considers the impact of foreign aid for HIV on the number of new infections in low middle income countries . We provide causal estimates by improving on earlier studies by addressing the endogeneity of aid disbursements through the use of instrumental variables. In addition, we effectively control for unobserved country specific effects that might jointly influence aid allocation and...

This paper presents a political economy model where there is mutual feedback between investor protection and stock market development. Better investor protection induces companies to issue more equity and thereby leads to a broader stock market. In turn, equity issuance expands the shareholder base and increases support for shareholder protection. This feedback loop can generate multiple equili...

We present results of a household-level survey on behaviors regarding refuses in the home waste-waters network. Interpreting survey results in a panel-data logit results show that most socio-economic and public good-related respondent’s characteristics do not play a significant role in explaining choices to discard in the home waste-waters network. The only significant regressor, apart from the...

How does information technology (IT) affect the organization of police work? How does it in turn affect police crime-fighting effectiveness? To answer these questions, we construct a new panel data set of police departments covering 1987-2003. We find that while IT adoption had substantial effects on a wide range of police organizational practices, it had, by itself, a negligible impact on crim...

This paper provides new estimates of the effects of corruption and poor institutions on trade protection. It exploits data on several measures of trade protection including import duty, international trade taxes, and the trade-GDP ratio. The paper complements the literature on the relationship between corruption and trade reform. It deviates from the previous literature in several ways. First, ...

I use an instrumental variable approach to estimate the effect of excise taxes on cigarette smuggling. The IV approach addresses the potential endogeneity of excise taxes while controlling for other determinants of smuggling. I use panel data on 47 states from 19902009. The main results confirm the validity of the instrument, the percent of Democrats in the upper house of state legislatures, bu...

It is widely believed that globalization affects the extent of employment and wage responses to economic shocks. To provide evidence for this, we analyze the effect of firms’ exporting behavior on the elasticity of labor demand. Using rich, German administrative linked employer-employee panel data from 1996 to 2008, we explicitly control for self-selection into exporting and endogeneity concern...

A critical review of cointegration is presented in this paper, emphasizing some limitations of this approach to testing causal relations in Econometrics. We present an application of cointegration tests to the relation between Private Consumption and Gross Domestic Product in 25 OECD countries, during the period 1960-97, and the results confirm those limitations and the convenience of giving mo...

Based on German individual-level panel data, this paper empirically examines the impact of self-managed working time (SMWT) on employee effort. Theoretically, workers may respond positively or negatively to having control over their own working hours, depending on whether SMWT increases work morale, induces reciprocal work intensification, or encourages employee shirking. We find that SMWT empl...

Informal care is a vital pillar of the British welfare state. A well-known fact in the small economic literature on informal care is the apparent negative relation between care responsibilities and labour market participation. Yet, caring and labour market participation may be endogenous. Using an instrumental variable approach and panel data techniques and employing data from the British House...