Scott J. Wallsten

Do Remittances Act Like Insurance? Evidence From a Natural Disaster in Jamaica

Previous research suggests a correlation between income shocks and remittances (money migrants send to households in their home country). Data constraints, however, have prevented this research from dealing with endogeneity issues or estimating the degree to which remittances may insure against shocks. In this paper we construct a household-level panel dataset for Jamaica that includes not only remittance information, but also detailed information about damage incurred due to a major hurricane (Gilbert). The exogenous nature of the shock, the panel data, and the monetary estimates of damage allow us to address these gaps in the literature. We find, even controlling for household fixed effects and potential moral hazard problems by endogenizing hurricane damage, that remittances do act as insurance, but only partially: our parameter estimates suggest that remittances increased by only about 25 cents for every dollar of damage the hurricane inflicted on the household.

New Tools for Studying Network Industry Reforms in Developing Countries: The Telecommunications and Electricity Regulation Database

Infrastructure industries-including telecommunications, electricity, water, and gas-underwent massive structural changes in the 1990s. During that decade, hundreds of privatization transactions valued at billions of dollars were completed in these sectors in developing and transition economies. While privatization has received the most attention, reforms also included market liberalization, structural changes like unbundling, and the introduction of new laws and regulations. To date, regulations have received far less attention than their potential economic effects warrant, largely due to lack of data. In order to address this problem, the authors set out to compile a comprehensive and consistent dataset through an extensive survey of telecommunications and electricity regulators in developing countries. The authors describe the surveys and the resulting database. The database of telecommunications regulations includes 178 variables on regulatory governance and content in 45 countries. The database of electricity regulations includes 374 variables in 20 countries.

The Economic Costs of the War in Iraq

Government policies are routinely subjected to rigorous cost analyses. Yet one of todays most controversial and expensive policies - the ongoing war in Iraq - has not been. The

Telecommunication Reform in Ghana

212 billion allocated by the U.S. Treasury has been widely reported. But the real, direct economic costs include more than budgetary allocations. Other costs include lives lost, injuries, and lost civilian productivity of National Guard and Reserve troops mobilized for the conflict. The conflict, however, also has generated cost savings, especially in terms of resources no longer being used to enforce UN sanctions and people no longer being killed by Saddam Husseins regime. In this paper we monetize these direct costs and avoided costs of the war in Iraq, both todate and the total expected net present value of costs through 2015. Our estimates are imprecise. The data are not of high quality and every calculation requires a number of assumptions. In addition, we do not calculate indirect effects of the conflict, such as its impact on oil prices or other macroeconomic impacts, or certain intangibles, like the benefits of a stable democratically elected government in Iraq, should one emerge. Nonetheless, our best estimates suggests that the direct economic costs to the U.S. through August 2005 are about

An Assessment of Indian Telecommunications Reform

255 billion, about

Has Private Participation in Water and Sewerage Improved Coverage? Empirical Evidence from Latin America

40 billion to coalition partners, and

Net Neutrality, Unbundling, and their Effects on International Investment in Next-Generation Networks

134 billion to Iraq. These estimates suggest a global cost to date of about

Universal(Ly Bad) Service: Providing Infrastructure Services to Rural and Poor Urban Consumers

428 billion. The avoided costs, meanwhile, are about

Has the Internet Increased Trade? Developed and Developing Country Evidence

116 billion. We estimate that the expected total net present value of the direct costs through 2015 could be

The effects of ownership and benchmark competition: An empirical analysis of U.S. water systems

604 billion to the U.S.,