In 2004, the Chávez regime in Venezuela distributed the list of several million voters whom had attempted to remove him from office throughout the government bureaucracy, allegedly to identify and punish these voters. We match the list of petition signers distributed by the government to...

The quadratic multiple knapsack problem (QMKP) consists in assigning a set of objects, which interact through paired profit values, exclusively to different capacity-constrained knapsacks with the aim of maximising total profit. Its many applications include the assignment of workmen to...

Our paper in this issue sets out to do a simple task: to empirically evaluate the hypothesis of an inverse relationship between the number of low-skilled migrant workers and their rights using existing cross-national data. In his reply, Martin Ruhs argues that our criticism is unconvincing...

This paper explores the empirical support behind the idea that there is a trade-off between the size of low-skilled migrant labor populations and the rights and entitlements accorded to them. We first look at the empirical correlation between measures of migrants' rights and the size of both the...

Do countries with lower policy-induced barriers to international trade grow faster, once other relevant country characteristics are controlled for? There exists a large empirical literature providing an affirmative answer to this question. We argue that methodological problems with the empirical...

We evaluate the success of the Venezuelan government's latest nationwide literacy program, Misión Robinson, using official Venezuelan government survey data. Controlling for existing trends in literacy rates by age groups over the period 1975-2005, we find at most a small positive effect of...