In Africa, boundaries delineated during the colonial era now divide young in-dependent states. By applying regression discontinuity designs to a large set of surveys covering the 1986-2001 period, this paper identities many large and significant jumps in welfare at the borders between five...

We provide a first attempt to include off-balance sheet, implicit inssurance to SIFIs into a consistent assessment of fiscal sustainability, for 27 countries of the European Union. We first calculate tax gaps à la Blanchard (1990) and Blanchard et al. (1990). We then introduce two alternative...

This paper analyzes the respective impact of aid, remittances and medical brain drain on child mortality using panel and cross-country quintile-level data on respectively 84 and 46 developing countries. Our results show that remittances reduce child mortality and that the impact of health aid is...

Aid coordination is a constant theme of discussion among national and international aid agencies in their search for more effectiveness and efficiency in delivering development assistance. This paper seeks to clarify some of the arguments currently made in support of aid coordination, and to...

This paper studies the impact of globalization on household income inequality end poverty using detailed microdata across Brazilian states from 1987 to 2005. Results suggest that the Brazilian states more exposed to tariff cuts experienced smaller reductions in household poverty and inequality....

We adapt Yeaple's (2005) heterogeneous agents framework to model firms in the North as making explicit offshore outsourcing decisions to cheap-labor economies. Globalization results from a lowering of the set-up costs incurred when engaging in offshore activities. We highlight how firms'...

This paper examines how import penetration affects firms' productivity growth taking into account the heterogeneity in firms' distance to the efficiency frontier and country differences in product market regulation.

We develop a new methodology to identify high-end variety exporters in French fi rm level data. We show that they do not export to many more countries, but they export to more distant ones. This comes with a greater geographic diversi cation of their aggregate exports. In contrast to low-end...

We study the implication of a multipolarization of the international monetary system on crosscurrency volatility. More specifically, we analyze whether the internationalization of the yuan could modify the impact of asset supply and trade shocks on the euro-dollar exchange rate, within a...

We consider the effect of export sophistication on economic performance using regional variations within a single country (China) over the period 1997-2009. We confirm Hausmann, Hwang and Rodrik (2007)'s prediction that regions that specialize in more sophisticated goods subsequently grow...