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This paper evaluates the impact of fiscal incentives on firm performance in the Dominican Republic. In recent years, the Dominican government has approved several new corporate tax benefits. While the literature on value-added tax incentives is extensive, the impact of corporate tax incentives is less well studied and is the subject of an ongoing debate. Using firm-level panel data from 2006 to 2015, this analysis uses fixed- and random-effects models to examine the relationship between corporate tax incentives and selected firm-level performance indicators. The results reveal that corporate income tax exemptions positively impact the performance of individual firms in the Dominican Republic, but uneven tax treatment across firms distorts competition in the industrial sector, with negative effects on overall economic productivity.

This analysis examines the relationship between nonrenewable resource dependence, economic growth and income inequality. It uses a two-equation system in which the Gini index and GDP per capita are the dependent variables and the stock of nonrenewable resources as a share of national wealth -- i.e. resource dependence -- is the independent variable. Using a dataset that includes information on 43 countries from 1980 to 2012, this paper estimates several model specifications in order to check the robustness of the results under different assumptions and to account for income-group-related heterogeneity among countries. The baseline model provides strong evidence that natural resource dependence is negatively correlated with both per capita GDP and the Gini index; in other words, resource dependence is associated with lower income levels, but also with a more equal distribution of income. Interestingly, however, after controlling for country income group, the sign and magnitude of these relationships appear to become dependent on national-level structural characteristics. Among higher-income countries, greater nonrenewable natural resource dependence is associated with lower income inequality, while there is no statistically significant correlation with GDP per capita. Among the lower-income group, greater dependence on nonrenewable natural resources is associated with both higher levels of income inequality and lower per capita GDP. Further analysis focusing on a subsample of non-renewable resource rich countries confirms these findings.

This paper evaluates the impact of access to credit from banks and other financial institutions on household welfare in Mauritania. Micro-level data from a 2014 household survey are used to evaluate the relationship between credit access, a range of household characteristics, and welfare indicators. To address potential endogeneity issues, the household isolation level is used to instrument access to credit. The results show that households headed by older, more educated people are more likely to access financial services, as are households located in urban areas. In addition, greater financial access appears to be associated with a reduced dependence on household production and increased investment in human capital.

The aim of this paper is to explore the main determinants of credit card ownership by analyzing the variables that may affect the decision to hold a credit card. Using the 2012 Survey on Household Income and Wealth provided by the Bank of Italy as main source, we estimated count data models in order to identify the socio-economic, demographic and territorial variables affecting the credit card accounts held by households. Our estimates give evidence of the significance of the considered factors. In particular, we find that geographical location is an important determinant of families behavior in line with the socio-economic gap between the North and the South of Italy. Other relevant variables acting on the number of credit cards held are age, income, municipality size, gender, education and marital status. The reached results are interesting in depicting the main characteristics of cardholders and in helping the implementation of a segment-specific marketing program in the banking services industry.