This paper examines migrants' choice of destination conditional on migration. To this end, we design an empirical strategy which remedies both migration selection and unobserved heterogeneity problems. The study uses data from two rounds of Nepal Living Standard Surveys and a Population Census...

Using census data from Nepal we examine how the partial derivatives of predicted household welfare vary with parental education.We focus on fertility, child survival, schooling, and child labor. Female education is not as strongly associated with beneficial outcomes as is often assumed. Male...

This paper explores to what extent the magnitude and speed of the contagion effects that materialized in East Asia in the second half of 1997 may have had "real" underpinnings, in the sense that the pattern of production, consumption and trade increased the vulnerability of East Asian countries...

Anti-trust problems affecting markets for intermediate goods or services raise the input costs of firms operating in downstream sectors, which often face tough international competition. Such firms lose market share, thus worsening the economic performance of the country. We try to document the...

We consider one polluting industry in an open economy. The national government implements a policy of industrial pollution control by inducing appropriate technological innovations to reduce toxic emissions. The emission-reducing innovations are developed through firm-specific costly...

Despite the well known gains from trade, trade liberalization is one of the most politically contentious actions that a government can undertake. We propose and formalize a new explanation of this unpopularity. The explanation is based on uncertainty and is complementary to the usual...

In this paper we provide a quantitative examination of initiatives for post-Uruguay Round liberalization in ‘traditional’ GATT/WTO market access areas, as a counterpoint to the recent policy literature on newer issues such as the environment, competition policy, and labour standards. We...

We assess some likely consequences of commercial policy in an intertemporal CGE model of an imperfectly competitive, small open economy. Specifically, we combine an overlapping generations model of aggregate savings with capital accumulation by forward-looking investors and production under...

We examine the qualitative and quantitative predictions of a heterogeneous firm model à la Melitz (2003) in the context of the Canada - US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) of 1989. We calibrate our model to the pre-trade liberalization stage, simulate the trade liberalization, and compute the...

When trade costs are of the iceberg type (Samuelson 1952) and markups are independent of trade costs, relative prices across markets are distorted, but relative prices within markets are not. When trade costs depart from the analytically convenient iceberg type, distortion will also occur within...