We develop a model of exploitative child labor with two key features: first, parents have imperfect information about whether employment opportunities available to their children are exploitative or not. Second, firms choose whether or not to exploit their child workers. In our model, a ban on...

The recent reform of the federal welfare system is meant to encourage recipients to leave welfare and enter the workforce. If the reform is successful there are likely to be effects felt throughout the low-- skilled end of the labor market. As former welfare recipients enter the labor market,...

This paper investigates the impact of financial incentive programs, which have become an increasingly common component of welfare programs. We review experimental evidence from several such programs. Financial incentive programs appear to increase work and raise income (lower poverty), but cost...

This study compares transition processes in countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union (FSU) and sub-Saharan Africa. By widening the scope from most- to least-developed transition economies, the study establishes the importance of a strong state with evolved institutional...

Drawing on an in-depth governance micro-survey of public officials within a country, we address empirically the question of the relative importance of the various determinants of governance. We investigate the causes of poor governance, and show that commonly made inferences about policy based...

In this paper we identify the lines along which social ties between high school teenagers are primarily formed. To this end, we introduce interaction weights between pupils in the same school class that are a function of exogenous individual background characteristics, like gender, ethnicity,...

This paper is concerned with the effect of household size on the allocation of household money and time to food consumption. A broad literature has examined household economies of scale. Since food is a private good, it might be expected that larger households, which could economize on shared...

The note documents and discusses the modalities and consequences of the phenomenon of siphoning profits of state enterprises for private uses by state enteprise managers and insiders in Bulgaria during the period of early transition.

Undesirable outputs are often produced together with desirable outputs. This joint production of good and bad outputs brings about a difficulty for productivity measurement. Here we introduce a directional distance function and use it as a component in a new productivity index. This index, as an...