We survey and assess the literature on the positive and negative effects of ethnic diversity on economic policies and outcomes. Our focus is on both focus both cities in developed countries (the US) and villages in developing countries. We also consider the endogenous formation of political...

When a stabilization has significant distributional implications (as in the case of tax increases to eliminate a large budget deficit) different socio-economic groups will attempt to shift the burden of stabilization onto other groups. The process leading to a stabilization becomes a "war of...

Recent trade and wages literature focuses on whether trade or technology has been the major source of increases in wage inequality in OECD countries since the 1980s. In this literature, no attention has been paid to demand side considerations. Using a simple heterogeneous goods trade model of...

This paper explores the use of structural models as an alternative to reduced form methods when decomposing observed joint trade and technology driven wage changes into components attributable to each source. Conventional mobile factors Heckscher-Ohlin models typically reveal problems of...

This paper sets out alternatives to the traditional model of labour supply used to analyse the welfare costs of income and/or sales taxes when preferences are defined over goods and leisure and the market wage yields the slope of the budget constraint. The innovation in our work is to assume...

Existing literature assessing the impacts of transfers on low income households assumes that transfer program participants benefit by the full amount of cash transfers received. We argue that because tax-back arrangements accompany such transfer programmes, and endogenous participantion...