The international literature on minimum wage greatly lacks empirical evidence from developing countries. Brazil’s minimum wage policy is a distinctive and central feature of the Brazilian economy. Not only are increases in the minimum wage large and frequent but also the minimum wage has been...

Some thoughtful questions and linear answers to the economic, social, and political consequencs that comes with restrictive regulating laws. 'Regulatory law is where Socialism meets Liberalism; or what might be called the highest form of Liberalism, the lowest form of Socialism.'

Election finances are usually lightly regulated in emerging democracies. As these democracies mature they seek to impose campaign spending limits, limits on contributions, and disclosure laws. The present paper reviews the experience with such laws in the United States and Canada and contrasts...

This paper investigates the effects of the sources of candidates' campaign funding on their electoral outcomes, with particular emphasis on whether candidates who rely on a narrow base of funding suffer adverse electoral consequences. An extensive dataset consisting of over 650,000 contributions...

Spending limits are an important rule in the electoral game. Critics of limits claim that incumbents write these rules to keep down promising challengers. Their arguments are seductive but do not stand on a firm empirical base. The data seem quite eager to support or reject the critics' view,...

The economics of information goods suggest the need for institutional intervention to address the problem of revenue extraction from investments in resources characterized by high fixed costs of production and low marginal costs of reproduction and distribution. Solutions to the appropriation...

This paper looks at the evolution of the labour markets in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania since the beginning of transition (in some respects since 1996/1998) until 2003, with a particular focus on labour force participation. How did labour supply in the Baltic countries respond to changes in...

Parental education is found to have a strong positive effect on propensity to enroll in and complete secondary and tertiary education, both in Soviet times and during transition, but mother’s education effect have been weakening. A human capital gap between titular ethnicities and Russian...

This paper describes the geographical location and internal mobility of the Mâori ethnic group in New Zealand between 1991 and 2001. It is often suggested that Mâori are less mobile than other ethnic groups because of attachment to particular geographical locations. We compare the mobility of...

The current organization of forensic work may induce biases in forensic analysis (Risinger et al. 2002). Such biases may have a differential impact across groups, creating differential bias. We should reorganize forensic work to reduce differential bias. The obvious strategy of hiring ethnically...