Purpose This paper is a dedication to Professor Ngo Van Long who introduced the idea of Kant-Nash equilibrium. The author extends this analysis to the study of adult and child labor markets. Design/methodology/approach This is a game theoretic analysis of the market for adult and child workers...

We estimate the long-term effect of the Rwandan genocide on the work of the children born after the genocide, using variation in genocide intensity across communes and child work incidence in the 2010 Demographic Health Survey. We instrument for the number of killings at the commune with its...

With comprehensive immigration reform dead for the foreseeable future, immigration laws enacted at the subfederal level -- cities, counties, and states -- have become even more important. Arizona has dominated media coverage and become the popular representation of the states’ response to...

High levels of government debt depress productive investment in a number of ways. High outstanding debt keeps market interest rates high crowding out private investment. Risk of default reduces incentives to invest or creates adverse selection in the mix of investments. Government revenue must...

This study provides new evidence on the impact of health insurance coverage on household vulnerability using the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Surveys (VARHS) for 2010 and 2012. We apply propensity score matching to address the non-random selection of households into health insurance...

The phenomenon of subfederal immigration regulation, in which state and local governments enact laws regulating immigrants within their jurisdictions, has proven its staying power. Based on five years of empirical data (2005-2009), we observe that states have created widely divergent climates...

The restrictive changes made by the Trump presidency on U.S. immigration policy have been widely reported: the significant increases in both interior and border enforcement, the travel ban prohibiting immigration from majority-Muslim countries, and the termination of the DACA program. Beyond the...

This paper evaluates the impact of the 2006 European Union antidumping action on Vietnamese footwear in three markets: imports to the EU, footwear producers in Vietnam, and the trade diversionary adjustment of Vietnamese firms in the U.S. market. We find that the AD action reduced Vietnamese...

We develop an economic model that explains historical data on government corruption in Ming and Qing China. In our model, officials' extensive powers result in corrupt income matching land's share in output. We estimate corrupt income to be between 14 to 22 times official income resulting in...

We propose a theory of 'regulatory endogenous sunk costs' (RESC), in which a captured regulator raises minimum quality standards when market size increases in order to protect incumbent firms. Our RESC theory's predictions that market size is unrelated to industry concentration and positively...