Lately, questionings have emerged on how public resources are managed. This work calculates the technical efficiency of municipalities in Chile, with special emphasis on the political factors that drive efficiency in the management of local resources. In particular, focus is placed on the relationship between political ideology of the local government and central government. To do this, we use a panel data of Chilean municipalities for the years 2010-2016. The methodology follows two stages. First, we estimate efficiency scores by the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach.

We present the results of a series of economic laboratory experiments designed to study the compliance behavior of polluting firms when penalties are stochastic. The experiments consist of a regulatory environment in which university students faced emission standards and an enforcement mechanism composed of audit probabilities and penalties (conditional on detection of a violation).

The last decade has seen a significant global increase in immigration. This large growth has caused an increasing opposition to immigration in local populations in many parts of the world, partly because of a commonly held belief that immigration increases crime. Using data from Chile, spanning 10 years, from 2005 to 2015, we analyze the relationship between immigration and crime through a dynamic Spatial Durbin Model (SDM), which accounts for the possible bias for omitted variables.

Global climate change will have a strong impact on Nigeria, particularly on agricultural production and associated livelihoods. Although there is a growing scientific consensus about the impact of climate change, efforts so far in Nigeria to deal with these impacts are still rudimentary and not properly coordinated. There is little evidence of any pragmatic approach towards tracking climate change in order to develop an evidence base on which to formulate national adaptation strategies.