In many countries, the authorities turn a blind eye to minimum wage laws that they have themselves passed. But if they are not going to enforce a minimum wage, why have one? Or if a high minimum wage is not going to be enforced one hundred percent, why not have a lower one in the first place?...

This paper develops a theory of employment guarantees when labor markets are imperfect and when the credibility of government policy announcements could be in doubt. The basic feature of an EGS is that any individual who satisfies a set of specified criteria is guaranteed public employment at a...

Despite the merits of eco-labeling as a consumer information and market-based environmental policy alternative, the promise that green consumerism holds in encouraging environmentally conscious production decisions also raises concerns over whether eco-labeling deters the market access of...

This paper proposes a trade restrictiveness indicator that explicitly incorporates environmental externalities. The index employs directional distance functions and use indicators (i.e. differences rather than ratios) modified to account for and evaluate efficiency changes in the face of...

Appropriate assessment of the social value of market access is at the core of a broad range of inquiries in trade research. A selection include: the appraisal of industry-level production and consumption distortions due to selective trade liberalization and partial tax reform; the construction...

For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. Less well known is the fact that development of newly cultivated land has in fact consistently exceeded land conversion from 1999-2006. This paper provides an analytical model that makes sense...