The success of infrastructure projects in low-income countries and the role of selectivity

This research analyzes the success of the infrastructure projects financed by the World Bank, focusing on the causal link between the quality of project implementation and its outcome. The results show that the success of infrastructure projects depends fundamentally on the quality of implementation. Although bad implementation can harm structurally solid projects, good implementation cannot make structurally weak projects successful. This leads to the conclusion that governance and selection of well-designed projects are essential for success and, in order to improve project outcomes, multilateral development banks may need to align their incentives toward this objective and invest more in governance and capacity building.Banks&Banking Reform,Debt Markets,Public Sector Corruption&Anticorruption Measures,Emerging Markets,Housing&Human Habitats

The impact of pro-vulnerable income transfers : Leisure, dependency and a distribution hypothesis

This paper studies a transmission mechanism through which pro-vulnerable income transfers may affect individual decision-making of non-beneficiaries in an extreme poverty context, leading to labor supply contraction and the so-called dependency syndrome. The argument is based on the distributional distortion this transfer may provoke to the relative quality of leisure, enjoyed by the population in an extreme poverty scenario. Assuming the existence of vulnerable individuals and different income groups based on certain physical, economic, or social characteristics, the author studies their decision processes and, in particular, their reactions to the aid program. The results of this theoretical research provide some insights on the conditions that an optimal pro-poor income transfer should present. A literature review is presented in support of the arguments made in the theoretical part.Labor Policies,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Economic Theory&Research,Services&Transfers to Poor,Food&Beverage Industry

The highway concession system in Italy : history, regulation and politics

This paper contains a critical discussion of the opening of the highway concession to the private sector in Italy over the past 20 years. It describes the political context, legal mechanisms and regulatory settings; offers an analysis of the changes in the equity composition of concessionaires after the introduction of public-private partnerships, quality standards, and tariff dynamics; and provides some examples. The Italian experience reflects the typical problems of the"build-now-regulate-later"approach recognized in the highway public-private partnership literature. The Italian model is also characterized by the existence of an overly complex regulatory framework, as well as the lack of a single agent in charge of contract enforcement and independent data collection.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Debt Markets,Roads&Highways,Infrastructure Economics,Bankruptcy and Resolution of Financial Distress

Bureaucrat allocation in the public sector: evidence from the World Bank

The allocation of bureaucrats across tasks constitutes a pivotal instrument for achieving an organization's objectives. In this paper, I measure the performance of World Bank bureaucrats by combining the universe of task assignment with an evaluation of task outcome and a hand-collected dataset of bureaucrat CVs. I introduce two novel stylized facts. First, bureaucrat performance correlates with task features and individual characteristics. Second, there exists a negative assortative matching between high-performing bureaucrats and low-performing countries. In the aftermath of natural disasters, which may weaken countries' performance even further, I observe that low-performing countries receive an additional allocation of high-performing bureaucrats. I discuss various interpretations of these findings

The impact of Chinese FDI in Africa: evidence from Ethiopia

We exploit exogenous variation in China’s export taxes to investigate the impact of Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Ethiopia. Higher sector-specific export taxes in China lead to more Chinese FDI in Ethiopian districts specialized in those sectors and generate highly heterogeneous effects. Domestic firms competing with Chinese FDI reduce their sales, investment, inputs and prices, while firms in upstream and downstream sectors expand. We build a 20-year district panel of night lights and observe that Chinese FDI leads to no instantaneous impact on local growth, but significant and persistently positive effects after 6-12 years

Antitrust policies and profitability in non-tradable sectors

Firms in tradable sectors are more likely to be subject to external competition to limit market power, while nontradable firms are more dependent on domestic policies and institutions. This paper combines an antitrust index available for multiple countries with firm-level data from Orbis covering more than 12 million firms from 94 countries, including 20 sectors over 10 years and finds that profit margins of firms operating in nontradable sectors are significantly lower in countries with stronger antitrust policies compared to firms operating in tradable sectors. The results are robust to a wide variety of empirical specifications

Essays in development, banking and organisations

This thesis contains four chapters that participate to the literature between development economics, banking and organisational economics. The first chapter shows that deposit volatility and costly bank liquidity increase the long ­term lending rates offered by banks, which reduce loan maturities,long-term investment and output. Together with my co-author(Ali Chaudhary from the State Bank of Pakistan), we formalise this mechanism in a banking model and analyse exogenous variation in deposit volatility induced by a Sharia levy in Pakistan.Data from the credit registry and a firm-level survey show that deposit volatility and liquidity cost: 1) reduce loan maturities and lending rates; 2) leave loan amounts and total investment unchanged;3) redirect investment from fixed assets towards working capital.A targeted liquidity program is quantified to generate yearly output gains between 0.042% and 0.205%. The second chapter,with my co-author(Francesco Strobbe from the World Bank), focuses on the importance of liquidity regulation in absence of deposit insurance and credible safe-asset commitment by banks.We show that bank liquidity regulation creates a commitment device on repaying depositors in bad states,which can: 1) stimulate a deposit inflow, moderating the limited liability inefficiency; 2) promote bank profits and branching, if deposit growth exceeds the inter mediation margin decline.Our empirical test exploits an unexpected policy change, which fostered the liquid assets of Ethiopian banks by 25% in 2011. Exploiting the cross sectional heterogeneity in bank size and bank-level databases,we find an increase in deposits, loans and branches, with no decline in profits. The third chapter focuses on the role of financial regulation, starting from the observation that it can create a demand for government bonds, generating government revenue gains. Together with my co-author(Francesco Strobbe from the World Bank),we study an Ethiopian banking regulation introduced in 2011, forcing banks to purchase a negative-yield government bond. High-frequency bank data and public finances documentation allow tracking the subsequent government revenue gain. This policy is compared to three alternatives: raising funds competitively on international markets;distorting the state-owned bank lending; and raising deposits through state-owned bank branches. Our results suggest that the revenue gain is moderate(1.5--2.6% of tax revenue); banks amass more bonds; their profitability slows without turning negative (from 10% to 2%). In the fourth chapter I study the impact of World Bank managers on project success through the value-added method. Manager effects are interpretable as performance indices and are more volatile than country effects. Both correlate positively with determinants of productivity (i.e., schooling and institutions respectively) and provide evidence of a negative assortative matching,with high-performing managers assigned to low-performing countries. Exploiting a novel variation for World Bank board access, I find a significant manager premium for countries in the board.All of these results are consistent with the World Bank behaving as a planner which assigns its managers as project inputs to client countries

El derecho privado entre dos bicentenarios. A propósito de los treinta y cinco años de Prudentia Iuris

Hace treinta y cinco años nacía nuestra revista. Es difícil no recordar aquellosaños de vida universitaria y lo que significa y ha significado que una publicación sehaya mantenido con vida y siempre actualizada a través del tiempo; de allí nuestrafelicitación y saludo1.Para homenajearla nos parece adecuado aportar un breve comentario sobre untema que, con la puesta en vigencia del nuevo Código Civil y Comercial unificado, cobrafuerza, sin desconocer que todo aporte que se haga no puede sino ser provisorio.Van entonces unas palabras sobre las transformaciones del Derecho Privado entredos Bicentenarios