Most normative studies on child labor arrive at the conclusion that child labor is detrimental to social welfare. Child labor is, however, still prevalent in many developing countries even though in many of these countries it is forbidden by law. In this paper we develop a politicaleconomic...

Countries can reduce global emissions by reducing own consumption since they are linked to the total value of consumption world wide. Two effects are at issue: a utility loss from forgone consumption and a utility gain from lowered temperature change. It is thus unclear whether own country...

Direct measures of the economic impact of sanctions are contaminated by the endogeneity that arises when other events in target countries (e.g., civil or interstate conflicts, political independence, etc.) instigate the imposition of sanctions. To address this issue, we propose a novel...

A two-tier climate club exploits the comparative advantage of large countries to mete out punishments through trade, while taking their capacity to resist punishment as a constraint. Countries outside the coalition price carbon at a fixed fraction of the average carbon price adopted within the...

Trade sanctions are a common instrument of diplomatic retaliation. To guide current and future policy, we ask: What is the most cost-efficient way to impose trade sanctions against Russia? We build a quantitative model of international trade with input-output connections. Sanctioning countries...

We study the impact of loan regulation in rural India on child labor with an overlapping-generations model of formal and informal lending, human capital accumulation, adverse selection, and differentiated risk types. Specifically, we build a model economy that replicates the current outcome with...

Beyond years of schooling, educational content can play an important role in the process of economic development. Individuals' choices of educational content are often shaped by the political economy of government policies that determine the incentives to acquire various skills. We first present...

We ask whether the birthplaces of Italian members of Parliament are favoured in the allocation of central government transfers. Using a panel of municipalities for the years between 1994 and 2006, we find that municipal governments of legislators’ birth towns receive larger transfers per...

Initially, voting rights were limited to wealthy elites providing political support for stock markets. The franchise expansion induces the median voter to provide political support for banking development as this new electorate has lower financial holdings and benefits less from the uncertainty...

We study how rich shareholders can use their economic power to deregulate firms that they own, thus skewing the income distribution towards themselves. Agents differ in productivity and choose how much labor to supply. High productivity agents also own shares in the productive sector and thus...