This paper examines the role of U.S. domestic politics in the allocation of foreign aid using panel data on aid to 119 countries from 1960 to 1997. Employing proxies for four aid allocation criteria (development concerns, strategic importance, commercial importance, and the degree of democratization), we find evidence that each influences aid allocation, although the evidence is stronger for some criteria (development concerns, commercial importance) than for others (strategic importance, degree of democratization). Furthermore, the allocation pattern depends on the composition of the U.S. government. When the president and Congress are liberal, development concerns receive more weight in the allocation process than when the president and/or Congress are more conservative. When the Congress is more conservative, commercial concerns have more weight than when the Congress is liberal. These findings have practical importance in light of current attempts to overhaul the allocation of both bilateral and multilateral aid.

One of the policy reforms promoted by the World Bank in recent decades is to reduce the often burdensome level of regulation by developing country governments and thus promote a reorientation from highly regulated and centrally controlled to deregulated and market-based economies. Indeed, poor growth performance and balance of payments problems on their own might well necessitate this transformation. Does World Bank lending promote deregulation with stronger incentives and critical resources (finance and advice) or slow the process by blunting the impact of crises and indirectly promoting state control via development planning and government sponsored projects? This paper analyzes empirical links between aid flows and regulatory burden. Econometric estimates based on panel data for 83 aid receiving countries from 1970 to 2000 find that World Bank lending, while not specifically targeting high or low regulatory states, is linked to lower subsequent regulation. This link holds for multilateral donors more broadly while bilateral donor funds apparently fail to influence the level of regulation.

This paper argues that the degree to which a given industry's labor contracts are complete or incomplete is the major factor determining whether its workforce will be unionized. For instance, assembly line industries feature complete labor contracts because of the nature of the production technology: Either a worker keeps up with the line, or he does not. In such a situation, there is no chance for a reciprocal gift exchange under which firms offer high wages in exchange for high effort levels. The result is low wages that make workers prone to unionization. By contrast, jobs that feature incomplete contracts (lawyers, computer programmers, economists) already have reciprocity and gift exchange in place. Such benefits guarantee to workers that their better interests will be looked after by a management that wishes to maintain a positive and productive labor-management interaction.

The larger a closed-end fund's premium over its portfolio value, the more intensely it is sold short. However, the intensity of short selling affects neither the rate at which premia mean revert to fundamental values nor the rate of return on fund shares. Consequently, short selling does not appear to constrain the mispricings found among closed-end funds. However, closed-end fund factor loadings in Fama French (1992) regressions are consistent with fund portfolio risks, suggesting that some form of arbitrage is bringing fund prices into line with fundamentals—despite the apparent inability of short selling to limit closed-end fund mispricings.

Robert Barro (1974) showed government debt has no real effects when generations are linked by altruistically motivated intergenerational transfers, a result now known widely as the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem.
An important condition for debt neutrality is believed to be the absence of strategic interactions between members of different generations. I use a simple two-period, parent and child model in which the parent is altruistic, to show Ricardian equivalence holds in the presence of intergenerational strategic behavior for a broad class of utility functions. The intuition for this result derives from the fact that the child's utility is a public good.

This paper provides a survey and synthesis of econometric tools that have been employed to study economic growth. While these tools range across a variety of statistical methods, they are united in the common goals of first, identifying interesting contemporaneous patterns in growth data and second, drawing inferences on long-run economic outcomes from cross-section and temporal variation in growth. We describe the main stylized facts that have motivated the development of growth econometrics, the major statistical tools that have been employed to provide structural explanations for these facts, and the primary statistical issues that arise in the study of growth data. An important aspect of the survey is attention to the limits that exist in drawing conclusions from growth data, limits that reflect model uncertainty and the general weakness of available data relative to the sorts of questions for which they are employed.
N.B.: This working paper is the preprint for:
"Growth Econometrics," 2005, Paul Johnson, Steven Durlauf, and Jonathan Temple, <em>Handbook of Economic Growth</em>, edited by P. Aghion and S.N. Durlauf, North-Holland: Elsevier. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/S1574-0684(05)01008-7" target="_blank" title="Persistent link using digital object identifier">https://doi.org/10.1016/S1574-0684(05)01008-7</a>

This paper is based on the notion that the nature of current labor market informalization requires rethinking in order to guide action and formulate social policies for eliminating poverty and reducing economic inequality and job insecurity. It explores conceptually and empirically the dynamics of informality and demonstrates the interconnectedness of job precariousness, vulnerability and gender relations.There are five related aspects to this process of informalization that are explored in the conceptual framework namely: 1) increasing labor market flexibilization; 2) the weakening (even absence) of the labor contract; 3) rising income inequality and worker differentiation; 4) institutional questions related to ownership and appropriation of production; and 5) gender-related socially ascribed positions in society and within the household.
The empirical section is based on the 2002 sample survey data of poor urban households engaged in home-based work collected in Bolivia and Ecuador as part of a four-country research project that attempts to understand the roles of financial and labor resources in the coping strategies of urban poor households as their countries undergo rapid global market integration, financial crises and economic restructuring. Using employment and decisionmaking information on heads and spouses in the Bolivian and Ecuador sample data, the empirical investigation provides a gendered analysis of the informalization of employment among men and women respondents in couples (or dual adults) households to highlight the interconnectedness of job precariousness and gendered relations. Specifically, we adopt a gendered approach in examining the link between gender-based roles and relations with worker vulnerability.
The findings in the study points to the importance of rethinking social protection program for workers laboring in informalized settings. It concludes with a discussion of lthe different possible avenues for action to dealing with poverty and redressing regressive tendencies in the distribution of income and resources in the informal economy.

The paper analytically and empirically examines the issue of gender inequality in household wealth in the form of tangible assets among urban poor households Thailand. It seeks to answer the following questions: (1) is there a gendered pattern of asset ownership between husbands and wives; 2) during times of crises, is there a gendered pattern of asset depletion and 3) does asset depletion impact on men and women differently in regards to their income earnings capabilities? The answers are especially important since asset ownership and access impact the form of coping mechanisms and income earnings of men and women, hence on their individual well-being as well as the longer term well-being of the household.
This paper joins in the recent efforts in the literature in investigating gender differences in asset ownership and depletion. In particular, we explore analytically and empirically this type of gender inequality among 135 couples, with and without dependents using quantitative and qualitative data drawn from a random sample of 152 urban, low-income households in Bangkok (Thailand) in 2002. The multi-purpose survey included information at the level of the individual respondent on accumulated tangible or physical assets as well as the status of those owned assets six months later. Both husband and wife were interviewed separately and the data gathered from the multi-visit interviews include pertinent household and individual information, employment, credit as well as household decision making issues, division of tasks and earnings allocation for various expenses.
Tobit and probit tests are used to examine the varied factors that may affect the gendered pattern of asset depletion and whether there are any significant differences in asset depletion between men and women in the same households. In addition, two probit models are estimated in order to determine the effects of various individual and household characteristics on the probability of pawning or selling real assets and more specifically, business-related assets . The empirical results demonstrate that, alongside gender equality in employment opportunities and earnings, there is need to raise the importance of and promote advocacy for gender equality in wealth and assets, both public as well as private, and for policy interventions that addresses the gender-wealth gap.