This paper develops and tests two efficiency wage models of corruption in the civil service. Under fair wage models, civil service wages are an important determinant of corruption. Under shirking models, the level of wages is of secondary importance, as potential bribes dwarf wage income. The...

This paper examines the impact of trade costs on real exchange rate volatility. We incorporate a multi-country Ricardian model of trade, based on the work of Eaton and Kortum (2002), into a macroeconomic model to show how bilateral real exchange rate volatility depends on relative technological...

This paper examines the impact of trade costs on real exchange rate volatility. The channel is examined by constructing a two-country Ricardian model of trade, based on the work of Dornbusch, Fischer, and Samuelson (1977), which shows that higher trade costs result in a larger nontradable...

It is well known that in a small open economy where there is perfect substitutability between domestic and foreign assets and costless portfolio adjustment, the monetary authorities cannot control the money supply, but can influence the balance of payments through the use of domestic credit. It...

In pursuing a steady-state reserve target, policymakers in small open economies can resort to devaluation or to temporary increases in public saving. This paper contrasts the dynamic implications of these alternative policies in a model with optimizing agents who possess perfect foresight. In...

Islam proposes the replacement of an interest-based financial system with one which operates on the basis of risk and profit sharing. Using a general equilibrium model, this paper investigates some open-economy implications of the adoption of Islamic banking for growth and stabilization of the...

This paper analyses the impact of government tax and subsidy policy on immigration of human capital and the effect of such immigration on growth and incomes. In the context of a two-country endogenous growth model with heterogeneous agents and human capital accumulation, we argue that human...

Many arguments that have been advanced in favor of maintaining capital controls within the EC have not paid sufficient attention to the welfare consequences of this type of market intervention. Our paper provides a simple, optimizing framework in which the welfare consequences of capital...

In addition to transferring about 16 percent of GDP from exporters to importers, Uzbekistan’s quasi-fiscal multiple exchange rate regime generates identifiable welfare losses of 2-8 percent of GDP on import markets and up to 15 percent on export markets. These excess burdens have increased...

The paper proposes a new welfare-based measure to evaluate the distributive effects of public programs. The proposed measure differs from traditional approaches in two important ways: first, it is based on life-cycle considerations, since most public expenditure programs have an intertemporal...