The Arab Spring has led to very different outcomes across the Arab world. I present a highly stylized model of the Arab Spring to better understand these differences. In this model, dictators from the ethnic or religious majority group concede power if their country is oil-poor, but can stay in...

Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor...

The EU Directive on Free Movement of 2004 extended free movement within the EU to Union citizens who are inactive and gave them access to the welfare benefits of host countries. The paper examines the extent to which these measures provoke migration to those countries with the highest levels of...

This paper evaluates how different lengths of entry regulation impact market structure and market performance using a dynamic structural model. We formulate an oligopoly model in the tradition of Ericson and Pakes (1995) and allow entry costs to vary over time. Firms have the opportunity to...

Divided government is often thought of as causing legislative deadlock. I investigate the link between divided government and economic reforms using a novel data set on welfare reforms in US states between 1978 and 2010. Panel data regressions show that under divided government a US state is...

We consider the notion of welfare stigma a la Besley and Coate (1992b). This stigma is attributed to welfare claimants by society when they are perceived as undeserving in the sense that they falsely claim to be eligible for welfare benefits. However, due to imperfect information, this stigma...

This paper studies the welfare and policy implications of globalization when risk averse workers face the risk of unemployment. If the jobs performed by domestic workers can be easily substituted by imports, then globalization reduces wages and increases unemployment. In this situation, in the...

This paper assesses the effectiveness of a social public procurement policy in Switzerland that gives firms that train apprentices' a preferential treatment. We estimate the effectiveness of this social procurement policy on a firm's training participation, training intensity, and training...

In this paper we focus on the rapidly deepening bilateral India-China economic relationship. Each is deeply integrating into the global economy through trade and FDI inflows, China is seen as primarily manufacturing-lead growth with India as service-lead growth (see Rodrick & Subramanian...

Gravity models of international trade have been frequently applied to estimate the impact of common (official or spoken) language on bilateral trade. This study provides a meta-analysis based on 701 language effects collected from 81 academic articles. On average, a common (official or spoken)...